    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 24, 2000]
    [Pages 300-308]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Granoff Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    February 24, 2000

        Thank you so much. Dr. Rodin, thank you for
    bringing me here to Penn and to this magnificent hall. Mr.
    Mayor, thank you for all the kind things you
    said. I enjoyed working with you and with Mayor Rendell for Philadelphia. I don't think any American can
    understand our history, our present, or our future without knowing
    something about Philadelphia.
        And I want to thank the Members of Congress who have joined us
    today: Representative Chaka Fattah,
    Representative Joe Hoeffel, Representative
    Brady, thank you all for being here. I want
    to thank my Economic Adviser, Gene Sperling,
    and Karen Tramontano for coming from the
    White House, because they had a lot to do with whatever success we have
    enjoyed. And I want to thank Michael Granoff
    for giving

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    me a chance to attend one more inaugural than I'm entitled to under the
    Constitution. [Laughter]
        They actually promised me a banquet with a Philadelphia cheesecake.
    I don't know--cheesesteak, I mean. I don't know if I got it yet.
    [Laughter] If you knew how many cheesesteaks I have consumed since I
    became a candidate here--[laughter]--I think I could get a special line
    of credit for the revival of the city's economy just as a consumer.
        It's hard for me to believe that it was almost 8 years ago when I
    came here then as a candidate for President. It was a very memorable day
    for me. I had just come off an entire week without saying a word
    publicly, because I had lost my voice and my doctor ordered me to stop
    speaking. Now, that's torture for any politician, doubly worse if you're
    in a campaign you could still lose and awful if you think you might have
    something to say.
        In those 8 years, a lot of wonderful things have happened to me. I
    look out in this audience, and I see so many people, young, old, and in-
    between, that I have gotten to know in the years since then. Judith
    talked about how different it is now from the time when I was elected
    Governor when I was 32, in 1978. It's also quite a bit different than it
    was in 1992.
        When I took the oath of office as President, there were 50 sites on
    the World Wide Web. There are millions and millions now. At that time,
    we had high unemployment, deepening social problems, political gridlock,
    diminished hope. The Philadelphia Inquirer had just run a series which
    became a best-selling book entitled ``America: What Went Wrong?'' It
    was, unbelievably, a question that was on virtually everyone's lips just
    8 years ago.
        I had some pretty basic ideas that all boiled down to my conviction
    that there was nothing wrong with America that couldn't be fixed by
    what's right with this country and that the job of Government was to
    create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of
    their own God-given abilities, their ideas, and their efforts.
        When I came to Penn, I came here to outline a plan that I believed
    would unleash the pent-up potential of the private sector to build a new
    economy for all Americans, one that would literally breathe new life
    into the American dream. One of the things that I focused on then was
    the importance of advancements and investments in science and
    technology.
        Here at Penn before--even then, it was before the first graphical
    web browser had been created--I said we ought to have a national
    strategy to create a national information network to build on the
    promise of the Internet, to link every home, every lab, every classroom,
    every business in America. Well, today, thanks to the hard work of the
    American people and the vision of American entrepreneurs, we are seizing
    the potential of the Internet and other technologies. We have ushered in
    an economic transformation as profound as that of the industrial
    revolution, creating a high-performance economy powered by technology,
    driven by ideas, rewarding the values that are literally at the core of
    the American character: innovation, flexibility, and enterprise.
        And 7 years and some-odd months later--one month, I guess--we have
    almost 21 million new jobs; the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years;
    the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever
    recorded; the lowest poverty rate in 20 years; the lowest welfare rolls
    in 30 years; the highest homeownership on record; the longest economic
    expansion in our history.
        Today I want to use this inaugural lecture to talk fairly briefly
    about how we got here and where we go from here, to focus on how
    powerful new technologies are energizing every sector of our economy and
    how to keep this expansion going and to bring its benefits to people and
    places still far, far from the American mainstream.
        For me, today's forum is a prelude to a major economic conference I
    intend to convene at the White House on April 5th, to deal with the big
    cutting-edge economic issues still before us, with some of the Nation's
    top economists, CEO's, and other experts. I want to ask them to identify
    ways we can build on America's strengths and deal with our continuing
    weaknesses, to take what President Theodore Roosevelt called the ``long
    look ahead'' for America over the next several decades.
        But first, how did we get here? There are several reasons for this
    long economic expansion. I want to focus in detail on two, and then I
    will mention the others as well. First, fiscal policy was important. In
    an era where worldwide capital markets dominate the ability to get money
    and the price people pay for money,

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    nations can no longer purchase prosperity on the cheap by running
    continual big deficits and piling up debts.
        By 1993, we had quadrupled the debt of America in the previous 12
    years. It had given us enormous interest rates, a stagnant economy, a
    deep recession, and then a jobless recovery. One economics expert
    characterized it as a triple dip economy.
        I think it's important to understand why that happened. In 1981, we
    had a difficult economy, and there was an argument for some economic
    stimulation, which traditionally, going all the way back certainly to
    President Roosevelt and the time of the Depression, had entailed either
    tax cuts or public spending or a combination of both. But everyone
    understood that in order for that to work when the economy started going
    again, you had to cut the deficit. And we just never did it, I think
    partly because we had this dominant idea that somehow Government was the
    enemy in America, that it would always mess up a two-car parade, that
    there was no such thing as taxes that were too low, and that the deficit
    really didn't matter. But plainly, it did.
        I never will forget the first day, before I was even sworn in, that
    my then-designee for Secretary of the Treasury, Senator Lloyd
    Bentsen, the chairman of the Finance
    Committee, announced our economic plan. Just by announcing it, the bond
    market shot up, interest rates shot down, and the economy began to take
    off.
        Then, as had already been said, we basically took two big bites out
    of this apple. We passed a plan designed to cut the deficit by $500
    billion. It actually did almost double that. It passed by one vote in
    the House, one vote in the Senate. The Vice President cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. As he says,
    whenever he votes, we win. [Laughter] And I signed it in August of '93.
        It was a painful vote. A lot of Members of Congress were defeated
    for casting the vote, including Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who's here today. She gave up her seat in
    Congress to turn the American economy around. And the people who did it
    deserve the thanks of the American people, because it made all the
    difference in the world. And anybody who says that it didn't make any
    difference doesn't remember what interest rates were or what the level
    of investment was before it occurred.
        Then in 1997, we took another bite at the apple, and we passed the
    Balanced Budget Act. This time, it passed with a majority of both
    parties in both Houses, big majorities. And we had a national consensus
    for fiscal responsibility for the first time in 16 years.
        Now we've enjoyed the first back-to-back budget surplus in 42 years.
    We will pay about $300 billion off our national debt by the end of this
    year. We've actually been buying in some of the debt early, for the
    first time, as far as I know, in the history of the Republic.
        Now, why is this a good thing? Because the deficit reduction set in
    motion a virtuous cycle, reducing interest rates, freeing up an enormous
    pool of capital for private sector investment. It enabled people to
    borrow money to invest in new businesses, in new technologies. It
    enabled consumers to borrow money at lower cost for homes, for car
    loans, for college loans. A study I received a few months ago estimated
    that the average American family had saved, now, as a result of lower
    interest rates, about $2,000 a year on home mortgages and $200 a year on
    car payments and college loan payments, because of the lower interest
    rates that were the direct result of getting rid of the deficit.
        Therefore, I would argue that whether you are a Republican or a
    Democrat, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative, you
    should be for this. If you are a conservative, the case is self-evident.
    If you're a liberal, you ought to be for it because it helps poor people
    as well as wealthy people, and it gives the Government money to invest
    in education and health care and social projects without harming the
    economy. America needs a national consensus for a solid economic policy
    that responds to the realities of the global economy, and I believe we
    have it now.
        Now, I think it's also fair to say that almost nobody thought it
    would work as well as it did. And that's the second question. Okay,
    everybody--I thought it would work, but I remember when I was sitting
    around the table in Little Rock in December of '92 with the Democratic
    economists, not the Republicans, and I said, ``Okay, how low can we get
    unemployment without inflation?'' And the consensus was, somewhere
    between, oh, 5\1/2\ and 6 percent. You get below that, and you're going
    to have inflation, and the Fed will have to raise interest rates, and
    then it will slow the thing down.
        My instinct was we could do better than that. But I can tell you,
    nobody thought we could have 4 percent unemployment on a sustained

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    basis without inflation. How did that happen? Because of a dramatic
    increase in productivity by American businesses and American workers.
    Productivity over the last 4 years has grown at the rate of 2.8 percent
    a year, about twice the rate we saw in the entire decades of the
    seventies and the eighties.
        Why did that happen? That's the second thing I want to look at.
    Overwhelmingly, it was the role of technology investments, especially in
    information technology, that boosted this productivity. Today,
    information technology industries and firms alone constitute less than
    10 percent of our employment, but have contributed about a third of our
    economic growth over the last several years, generating jobs,
    parenthetically, that pay about 80 percent more than average wages in
    America.
        And just as Henry Ford's mass-produced motorcars and the assembly
    line itself had broad spillover effects on the productivity of the
    American economy, these new information technologies are doing the same
    thing, rifling through every sector of the economy and increasing the
    power of American workers and American firms to produce wealth and to
    broadly share it.
        This is a little appreciated fact, I think, except in general, and
    almost nobody has been able to properly measure it, which is why
    everybody underestimated both the length and the depth of this economic
    recovery. There are very few models which can capture it.
        But if you just look at the--take a traditional example that
    magnifies or illustrates the spillover effect. One of the biggest
    problems that businesses have is managing inventories. Let's say, if a
    manufacturer predicts that 1,000 units of his products will be needed in
    the month of July this year, and then July rolls around and demand turns
    out to be 10 percent less than the manufacturer thought it was going to
    be, 10 years ago when that happened, the manufacturer might not have
    recognized the drop in demand until it was too late and even larger
    inventories in parts and finished products had piled up in warehouses.
    And then because the inventories were so large, the manufacturer might
    have to cut back on orders, let's say, as much as 20 percent, which
    would often lead to significant job layoffs and an increase in
    unemployment.
        Today, information technologies allow industries to recognize
    instantaneously changes in demand and to manage their inventories much
    more quickly. A lot of the biggest retailers in America today literally
    have daily reports on every single product they have in every single
    store and manage all their inventories accordingly. That means that they
    can plan in a stable way to maintain the work force. And they also don't
    get behind when they have the opportunity to sell more of something.
        None of this would be possible if it weren't for information
    technology, even though its impact may be felt in the most traditional
    of business activities in America. It's the sort of thing that you see
    in every aspect of the American economy.
        Information technology is also having a profound impact on the speed
    with which new products are being brought to market. Detroit's
    automakers, for example, have used supercomputers and advanced networks
    to reduce the time it takes to develop new cars from 60 months to 30
    months or less.
        I grew up in the automobile business, and one of the biggest kicks
    I've gotten as President is going to the Detroit auto show. I only
    regret I didn't get to go every year. But it is fascinating to watch the
    progression of these new models and to see how much more quickly they're
    coming on-line and to also see the intersection of the information
    technology revolution with the revolution in material science, something
    that a lot of people on the Penn faculty have also been involved with
    over the last 10 or 15 years.
        Pharmaceutical companies are using supercomputers to simulate
    literally millions and millions of possible candidates for new drugs,
    cutting down development time for new anticancer drugs, for example, by
    several years.
        And of course, information technology is creating an infinite number
    of possibilities for electronic commerce for traditional businesses.
    Just for example, this past holiday season I bought a couple of
    Christmas gifts on-line from members of the Lakota tribe at the Pine
    Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a place that still has an
    unemployment rate of 70 percent, in a country with an unemployment rate
    of 4 percent. One of the reasons that their unemployment rate's so high
    is that they don't want to leave the lands of their ancestors, which are
    so physically distant from markets and consumers. But information
    technology can change all that, and in time, I'm convinced, can give us
    the chance

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    to build a truly national economy as we build a truly global economy.
        Business-to-business E-commerce is growing even faster than retail
    E-commerce. In 3 years, it may reach a staggering $1.3 trillion in the
    United States alone. Companies moving their operations on-line have
    found enormous savings. During a--listen to this--during a single hour
    of bidding in a recent business-to-business auction, the price of
    printed circuit boards was bid down by 42 percent, saving the ultimate
    buyer $6.4 million in one bid.
        When the Vice President and I first came into office, it was clear
    to both of us that technology would be an important part of our
    productivity growth. And we asked ourselves, what should the Government
    be doing? What is the Government's role in sharpening our high-tech edge
    to develop and disseminate new technologies?
        Well, first, we negotiated with our trading partners an historic
    information technology agreement which will eliminate tariffs on $600
    billion worth of semicomputers, computers, telecommunications equipment,
    and other high-tech products. We fought for and achieved the first
    comprehensive telecommunications reform in 60 years. We transferred
    large blocks of the airwaves from Government to the private sector,
    which has spawned new digital wireless industries. And thanks to the E-
    rate, which was part of the Telecommunications Act, Internet discount
    rates have been given to schools, to hospitals, to libraries in ways
    that have increased the number of our classrooms connected to the
    Internet from 3 percent in 1994 to 63 percent in 1999. And soon, we'll
    have 100 percent of our schools connected, except those that are too old
    to be wired, and that's a story for another day. But I'm trying to fix
    that, too.
        We've also worked to accelerate R&D at every level, pushing for an
    extension of the research and experimentation tax credit, increasing our
    national science and technology budget every single year over the last 7
    years.
        You know, Dr. Rodin mentioned ENIAC. Nearly all of the information
    innovation in the entire information age started as long-term research
    projects beyond the 3 to 5 year time horizons of most corporations and
    their ability to fund their own research. That is why we have tried so
    hard to expand the Federal Government's role and why we continue to do
    so.
        So, I think the role of fiscal responsibility was important. The
    role of technology is profoundly important in explaining not only why we
    had this recovery but why it's gone on so long and why it's operated so
    strongly and why it hasn't been overcome by inflation.
        Before I go on to talk about how we can keep it going and spread it,
    let me just mention, there are other factors as well. I don't think
    there's any question that, in addition to fiscal policy, we've had good
    monetary policy coming out of the Federal Reserve. And the reason is,
    the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Greenspan, was able to look at the evidence of the new economy over
    the traditional ideology, which would have said, ``You better stop this
    thing now, because it's gone on longer than anything else has. Therefore
    there is by definition inflation, even though you can't see it. So raise
    interest rates and stop it right now.'' He was resisting that, because
    he knew something was going on, even though no economist could give him
    a model which proved it. And I think that that has been very important.
        I think the fact that we have had two decades of bipartisan support
    in the White House for open markets in America has been very important.
    You know, when politicians talk about trade, they only talk about the
    products and services we sell around the world, and then they become
    vulnerable because we have a trade deficit. Well, one of the reasons we
    have a trade deficit is we quadrupled our debt over the previous 12
    years before I came here, and another reason is that our economy has
    been stronger than other people's economies, so we've had a demand
    greater than our ability to sustain it here at home. But I think it's
    important to point out that it's not just exports that are good. Imports
    can be good, too. Most of you who are here are wearing something that
    was made in another country. And you might rail against imports, but I
    bet you're not going to throw it away, whatever it is. It broadens
    consumer choice. And something else that has happened that almost nobody
    talks about is that the fact that we have had open markets has
    contributed to greater competition and kept down the risk of inflation.
        I never will forget when interest rates came way down in a hurry
    after I took office, and the homebuilding business just was booming. And
    everybody started buying homes because they could finance their
    mortgages at such low

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    rates. And there was a shortage of timber, and the price went through
    the roof. And I looked at the indicators, as I have every month since
    I've been here, and I said, ``Oh, my goodness, maybe we're not going
    to--surely this is not going to happen right now. Surely we're going to
    get more than a 2-year recovery.'' And it wasn't 2 months before the
    price of lumber had gone back down because of import substitutions,
    because when the price went up, the market became attractive; the market
    became sated, went back down, and we continued to grow without
    inflation.
        So I think that has been underappreciated. That's why we've tried to
    build bridges to Latin America, to Africa, to the Asian-Pacific
    countries, and I'll say more about that in a minute. But I think it's
    very, very important.
        I think the role of sophisticated capital markets in America is very
    important. Everybody knows what mistakes were made in the bad days in
    the eighties with the savings and loan crisis. We don't give enough
    credit to the fact that people have been able to get credit when they
    needed it for venture capital enterprises, continue to invest, and build
    the new economy. And those of us who want to see it spread believe there
    ought to be more venture capital into places and to the people who
    haven't had access to it.
        But our markets work better than most other countries do for
    entrepreneurs. That's why you have so many people just a couple of years
    older than most of the undergraduates here who are worth a couple
    hundred million dollars with their dot-com companies. It makes all of us
    who are older think we were in the wrong line of work for a long time.
    But an idea is not worth anything unless it can be translated in
    business into an enterprise, and that requires capital.
        And finally, I think you have to give a lot of credit to the
    businesses that restructured in the tough years of the eighties and to
    the American workers who put a higher premium on their own education and
    training than ever before and who have been very sophisticated in this
    economy, asking for pay increases more in line with the increase in
    earnings of their companies than ever before.
        One of the things people used to tell me, when I was an
    undergraduate in college, was that economic expansions were broken
    because working people saw the economy growing and they wanted their
    share of it and they would always ask for more than a growing economy
    would warrant and that would build inflation into the economy. You
    haven't seen that here. And it's a tribute to the people who work in
    America who understand the connection between economic growth of their
    firms and growth in their own paycheck and earning.
        So there's plenty of credit to go around. President Kennedy once
    said, victory has a thousand fathers; only defeat is an orphan. And I do
    think it's important to recognize there are many factors in this
    recovery. But I think they would not have happened, we would not have
    had it in the first place, had it not been for a responsible fiscal
    policy. And it clearly would not have gone on as long as it has and the
    way it has without the information technology revolution.
        So the next question is: Can we keep it going, and if so, how? And
    can we spread the benefits to people in places that have been left
    behind? I would suggest the following things. The first is, you can't
    forget what got us here. We have to maintain our fiscal discipline. When
    I put out my last budget, it was interesting. I figured I got it about
    right because I was attacked from the left for practicing Coolidge
    economics, because I want the country to pay its debt down; and I was
    attacked from the right for investing too much money in education,
    health care and the environment, and science and research. So I said,
    ``I must be doing this about right.'' [Laughter]
        But let me take the fiscal discipline argument. One of the ways
    we've continued to grow is to make capital available to the private
    sector. There's a lot of debt out there now, business debt and personal
    debt. It doesn't look damaging today because the debt-to-wealth ratio is
    still very good, because so much wealth has been generated in this
    economy. But we have to maintain confidence, and we have to keep
    interest rates down, which means we have to keep paying this debt down.
        We could, in effect, pay off all the publicly held debt that the
    Government has over the next 13 years. That would make America debt-free
    for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President. That's even
    before I was around--1835. Now, I would argue that in a global economy
    that's a good deal. Why? That means that your children will have a
    structure of interest rates lower than what would otherwise be the case.
    And unless you believe that

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    the process of globalization is somehow reversible and the global
    capital markets will somehow cease to exist, that has got to be good
    policy. So that, I think, is the first thing we have to do.
        The second thing we have to do is to continue to invest in our
    people. We have to continue to improve the productivity and availability
    of American people. There are still lots of people in this country that
    are unemployed or underemployed. We have to take all the people that are
    on public assistance of some kind or another, make sure they all have
    education and training and then access to jobs.
        I just announced an initiative yesterday rooted in the fact that
    two-thirds of the new jobs are being created in the suburbs and three-
    quarters of the people who want jobs are in inner cities or rural areas,
    not suburbs. And the Government that gives them assistance also has put
    all kinds of barriers in the way of these people having cars or social
    service or faith-based institutions buying vans and getting them from
    where they live to where the jobs are. But this is very important.
        We've got to continue to invest in education and training. The
    increases in the Pell grants we've had so far and the work-study program
    and the AmeriCorps program and the HOPE scholarship, which is a $1,500
    tax cut a year for most people for almost all of college, has in effect
    made 2 years of community college available to every American. We now
    have a proposal before Congress to make up to $10,000 of college tuition
    deductible for all Americans, at a 28 percent rate for people in the 28
    percent income tax bracket or the 15 percent income tax bracket. And if
    we did that, we would in effect make 4 years of college available at
    some 4-year institution to all Americans. I think it's an important
    thing to do.
        I urge all of you who will be undergraduates or graduate students
    here after the census is completed, whatever your field of study, to get
    a copy of the census and the analysis of it, because one of--the census
    data, whether you're into statistics or not, paints a picture of America
    unlike anything else. And it will document to you, in stunning terms,
    the premium of education, even more than you instinctively know. This is
    a profoundly important issue if you want America's economy to grow over
    the long run.
        The third thing we have to do is to continue to push for open
    markets and free trade. That's why I strongly support bringing China
    into the World Trade Organization. It's the biggest market in the world.
    Only about 5 percent of it is open to us now. We make no new concessions
    in our markets to get massive access to Chinese markets, in return for
    putting them into the World Trade Organization. It is economically a
    good deal. It is also very much in the national interest.
        If you--those of you who are young have no memory of the fact that
    your country fought three wars in Asia in the 20th century because of
    turmoil and instability. And China still does things that we don't agree
    with. But everything I've ever learned, not only as President but about
    human nature in my life, indicates that if we give them a chance to be a
    part of the global community and they have decided to take the risk of
    enterprise and lack of control and creativity--all of which runs counter
    to a top-down, totally controlled society--that we ought to give them a
    chance to make it.
        We can't control what China does. And I'm not going to stand here
    and tell you that they're going to turn out as we would hope. But I'll
    tell you this: We can control what we do. And if we do this, 20 years
    from now we'll look back and wonder why we ever even debated it. And if
    we don't, 20 years from now we'll still be kicking ourselves in the seat
    of the pants for turning away from an enormous opportunity to give our
    children a safer world. That's what I believe.
        I also think it is very important to recognize that in order to keep
    this economy going, we have to find more and more new customers. I'm
    going to the Indian subcontinent in a few days. I'm trying to get
    Congress to pass a new bill to open trade opportunities with Africa,
    with the Caribbean Basin, to do more with our neighbors in Latin
    America. Last year, Congress agreed to begin with me a historic effort
    for the United States to do its part to relieve the debt of the poorest
    nations in the world. A lot of the poorest countries in the world can't
    be our trading partners, can't grow, can't stabilize, because they're
    spending money they ought to be spending on education and health care
    and economic development paying interest on debt. And they'll never
    catch up. We're never going to get paid off anyway. And if we can get a
    commitment for that money to be reinvested in the economy and the
    education and the health care of the kids, we ought to have

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    a massive effort to relieve debt of countries that are well-governed and
    responsible.
        The next thing we have to do is to continue to open markets here in
    America. If you heard the State of the Union Address for the last 2
    years, you probably have heard all this before. But if I look for ways
    to continue to grow America's economy without inflation, I look to the
    areas of high unemployment. If you can create new businesses, new
    business owners, and new employees who are also consumers within our
    borders, that will grow the economy without inflation. It will also
    fulfill our moral responsibility to give everybody a shot at the
    American dream.
        I mentioned to you that the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has an
    unemployment rate of about 70 percent. But there are plenty of inner-
    city neighborhoods, including some in this city, and many rural areas
    that have unemployment rates that are still 2 times or more the national
    average. And yet I believe intelligence is pretty equally distributed
    throughout this whole world.
        I bet a lot of the students here have bought and sold things on
    eBay. You ever use eBay? Everybody that ever used eBay, raise your hand.
    Some of the young executives at eBay, I've become acquainted with them.
    And one of the things I learned is that 20,000 Americans now make a
    living on eBay--not working for eBay, not working for the company--make
    a living on eBay, buying and selling, and that many of them used to be
    on welfare. No car, no way to get to a job; get hooked up to a computer;
    find eBay; go around the neighborhood; find people you can do business
    with. And poof! You've made a business.
        Now, there is a real opportunity here. And I think we ought to--my
    basic theory is this: We ought to give the same tax incentives to
    Americans to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in
    poor areas of Latin America or Africa or Asia. I think it's very
    important. And it's a real opportunity.
        We've had great success in our enterprise zones, one of which is
    here; with our community development financial banks, which make loans
    to people who couldn't get them otherwise, one of which is in
    Philadelphia; with vigorous enforcement of the Community Reinvestment
    Act, which has been on the books for 22 years but over 95 percent of all
    the investments have occurred in the last 7 years, because it's good
    business to invest in honest people with skills and ideas and markets,
    who are in places that are underserved. And it will help the rest of us
    to keep this economy going.
        Final thing I'd like to say is, we've got to continue to deal with
    the full implications of this revolution that we're in--one, to stay on
    the far frontiers of science and technology in every way. Sooner or
    later, even the most hardheaded rejectionist will have to acknowledge
    that the problem of climate change is real and that we had better find a
    way to grow our economy and improve our environment at the same time,
    including reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the
    atmosphere. When we do that, we will realize that there is a $1 trillion
    potential market out there that will do wonders for the American economy
    if we are out there with the products and services necessary to save the
    planet.
        The same thing will be true with all the incredible discoveries that
    will be made in biology in this century. So we--that's why I recommended
    a $3 billion increase in our 21st century research fund and why I hope
    and pray and believe that there will be a bipartisan support for it in
    Congress.
        And the last point I want to make in this regard is that we have to
    close the so-called digital divide. When I mentioned to you that I
    bought those Christmas gifts from the Indian reservation through E-
    commerce, that's closing the digital divide. I mentioned to you that
    we're trying to hook up every classroom and library; that's closing the
    digital divide. We're going to try to train huge numbers of new teachers
    in all the schools in our country so their kids don't know more about
    the Internet than they do; that's closing the digital divide. We're
    going to establish 1,000 community centers so adults can have access to
    the Internet who don't have it now; that's closing the digital divide.
    We're doing to take a whole tour on that this spring.
        But I believe that not only within the United States but beyond it,
    we could skip years and years it would otherwise take to bring poor
    areas up to standards and educational opportunities and economic
    opportunities if we maximize the use of technology. And again, I think
    it's a great economic opportunity. But it won't happen by accident.
    We'll have to make a deliberate decision to do it.
        So these are the things that I think we have to do. We've got to
    stay the course on fiscal

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    discipline. We've got to stay the course on expanding trade. We've got
    to bring economic opportunities to people and places that haven't had
    them here in the United States. We've got to continue to lead to the far
    frontiers of science and technology. We've got to close the digital
    divide.
        One last point I would like to make, that I readily concede grows
    out of my political philosophy. Life is about more than economics, and
    societies do well economically when they are strong generally. That
    means I believe that when we passed the family and medical leave law,
    which has allowed 20 million people the ability to take time off from
    work for a newborn baby or a sick parent without losing their jobs, I
    think we strengthened the American economy. When we raised the minimum
    wage, I think we strengthened the American economy.
        And we have to continue to look for ways to balance work and family,
    because most people will tell you that the biggest challenge a lot of
    Americans face, now that most people have a job, is figuring out how to
    be good parents and successful in the workplace. And this is a challenge
    faced increasingly not just by people with low incomes but by people who
    are in middle and upper middle income positions. This is important.
        We have to face the challenge of the aging of America. Now that
    we're not spending this surplus that's being accumulated by your Social
    Security taxes, I think we ought to take the interest savings and put it
    in the Social Security Trust Fund. And if we do it right now, we can run
    that Trust Fund out to 2050, which means, when all the baby boomers get
    in retirement years and when we double the number of people over 65 in
    the next 30 years, that those of you who are having your children then
    will not have to worry about whether you can send your kids to college
    because you've got to pay for all of us. It's a great social question,
    but it will have a profound impact on the economy.
        So I ask all of you who are--particularly you young people--don't
    ever forget that there are what the economists used to call
    ``externalities'' that will affect the health of your economy. And the
    strength and cohesion of our society, the sense of fairness and justice
    and energy with which people get up and go to work every day, which are
    unmeasurable, will have a profound impact on the health and welfare of
    our American society.
        I think we have to keep working to eliminate hate crimes and the
    feelings of discrimination we have against people just because they're
    of a certain race or of a certain religion or because they're gay,
    because I think all that is not only bad, it has an impact on our
    ability to work together, to be productive, to make the most of our own
    lives. And I hope you will never forget that.
        I worked as hard as I guess any President ever has to fulfill our
    campaign commitment, which in 1992 in James Carville's eloquent words were, ``It's the economy,
    stupid.'' And I believe that, but I never believed it was just about
    money, and I never believed it was just about jobs.
        One of the most exciting things to me is that so many of these young
    people I see making huge sums of money in an economy of ideas are
    leaving all their money in their firms and still living on fairly modest
    wages and are a lot more worried about what they're going to spend their
    money on that's good, rather than what they're going to buy with their
    wealth.
        So the purpose of all this, never forget, is to build the more
    perfect Union of our Founders' dreams. That's the purpose of it. It's to
    give people control over and direction over their lives and the ability
    to raise their children and to follow their imagination. And no
    generation of Americans has ever had this chance to the extent that all
    of us do.
        So I hope that all of you will think about these things and ask
    yourself these questions: How did we get here? How are we going to keep
    it going? How are we going to give these opportunities to people in
    places that have been left behind? And what else do we have to do to be
    a better place, so we'll all be free to live up to the fullest of our
    God-given abilities?
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:55 p.m. in Irvine Auditorium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Dr. Judith Rodin, president, University of
    Pennsylvania; Mayor John F. Street and former Mayor Edward Rendell of
    Philadelphia; and Michael Granoff, founder and chief executive officer,
    Pomona Capital, who established the annual Granoff Forum lecture series.
    A portion of these remarks could not be verified because the tape was
    incomplete.