    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 24, 2000]
    [Pages 309-313]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner in New York City
    February 24, 2000

        If I had any sense, I would quit while I'm ahead. [Laughter] Next
    time we have an argument, Shelby, I'm going to
    play that back to you. We tape everything like this. [Laughter] Thank
    you, Shelby. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, all
    of you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here tonight and for your
    support at, I think, a very critical time.
        I would like to make just a few brief remarks, and I'd like to begin
    by thanking all of you for the contributions that you have made to
    America's prosperity. I have had occasion over the last couple of
    months--because we were coming up to February, and if the economy kept
    growing, then we knew it would be the longest economic expansion in our
    history and the first time we ever had an economic expansion remotely
    this long without a war somewhere in there chugging up things. And so--
    and I knew that I would be doing interviews and members of the press
    would be asking me, ``Well, what caused all this?''
        And I thank you for what you said. But if I could go back, my whole
    theory was, in 1991 and 1992 when I was running for President on the
    economic issues, is that there was this enormous pent-up capacity in the
    American economy; a whole culture of entrepreneurism; dramatic
    restructuring of traditional industries which had gone on in the 1980's
    in response to all the competition we had; by then, already 20, really
    almost a 40-year history, but certainly a 20-year history that went
    through my Republican predecessors as well, of having at least the
    Presidents always support open markets and expanded trade, which I think
    is a very important part of this whole strategy. And I think we should
    be doing more of it, and I'll say more about that in a minute.
        But I had a feeling that there was something structurally amiss that
    kept holding us down. We'd go into these recessions and then we'd get
    out, but we had anemic recoveries. We were in the midst of a statistical
    recovery that was

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    generating no jobs. Unemployment was still going up.
        And I felt strongly that it was the product of two things. Number
    one, we didn't get rid of the structural deficit that was created in
    1981, when we were in a recession and you could make a compelling
    argument that we needed to do what governments had been doing since the
    Great Depression, either cut taxes or increase public investment or
    both, to get us out of the recession. But always before, after a period
    when the economy started to grow again, we got rid of it. And instead--I
    think because we were in the grip of an ideology that said Government is
    always the problem, it will mess up a two-car parade, and you should
    never, ever do anything that increases revenues or does anything about
    this deficit--we had built in these huge interest rates and serious,
    serious imbalances in our economy.
        The second thing that I thought was holding us back is there was no
    real coherent theory about what kind of economy we were trying to
    create, what our role ought to be, and what your role was bound to be.
    And so we set about trying to change that. And I think that we ought to
    say here that--I felt confident that if we could get the deficit cut in
    half and then get rid of it, that we would lower the structure of
    interest rates in a way that would put more money into the hands of
    ordinary American consumers and make capital more available at more
    affordable rates to investors and to entrepreneurs.
        No one predicted that the recovery would go on as long and be as
    strong as it has, because no one had an economic model to measure the
    impact of technology on productivity. And one of the things I always say
    is, you have to give the Federal Reserve a lot of credit for this
    because if Alan Greenspan had followed all
    the textbook economic models, he could have killed this recovery,
    because everybody would have said, ``Well, after 2 years or 3 years or 4
    years or 5 years, some point along the way, you've got to shut this
    down, because every time this has ever happened before, inflation has
    been raging.'' And he was willing to look at the evidence, not the
    theory, and not get in your way.
        And what I tried to do was two things. I've always believed that the
    primary role of Government in the globalized information society in
    which we live is to establish the conditions and give people the tools
    necessary to make the most of their own enterprise and their own
    talents, and to invest in those things that otherwise would not be
    invested in, without which we cannot be the society we ought to be.
    That's basically what I think the role of Government is.
        So the first thing we had to do was get rid of the deficit. And you
    heard Shelby say that--pointed out that Al Gore passed the tie-breaking vote. One of his great lines is,
    ``Whenever I vote, we win.'' [Laughter] And I must say, I didn't have
    any gray hair when I became President. He's cast too many votes to suit
    me; there are all these close votes, you know. [Laughter] But it's true,
    whenever he votes we win.
        And when we announced the economic program--just when we announced
    it--when Lloyd Bentsen announced it in
    December of '92, the bond market went up; the interest rates dropped;
    and the rest is history. And the deficit reduction package turned out to
    have greater savings than we thought because there was more economic
    growth than we thought being triggered out of it.
        Then in '97, we had a bipartisan Balanced Budget Act that carried
    big majorities of both parties in both Houses. And I thought we had
    established the first bipartisan economic policy, or at least fiscal
    policy, in 16 years. And then the Congress passed the tax cut I felt
    strongly was too big, given the obligations out there on Social Security
    and Medicare and other things, and I vetoed it. And now, just listening
    to the debate, we might be about to get back to a bipartisan fiscal
    policy. But I think that is very important.
        The other thing we tried to do, the second thing I think is also
    very important--I believed that it was very, very important that we do
    other things, the financial modernization bill, a continued aggressive
    trade policy. We've had over 270 trade agreements.
        I hope all of you will support my attempt to bring China into the
    World Trade Organization by giving them permanent normal trading status.
    I think it's very important, not just for economic reasons but for
    economic reasons among others. And it's a 100 percent economic winner
    for us because we make no concessions except to let them come in, and
    they open their markets to us. I also think it would be very good for
    the cause of freedom and human rights in China.

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        Then I thought the Telecom Act was very important. And I know a lot
    of you do. But we had these big, big fights, some of which were public,
    some of which weren't so public, because we were trying so hard to get
    it right. And it seems to me that, other things being equal, we ought to
    always opt for competition. We ought to always opt for--we've got an
    idea-based economy here.
        One factor that never gets enough credit, by the way, I think, in
    America's recovery is the sophistication of our capital markets. Just
    like the failure of the S&L crisis and doing deregulation in the wrong
    way helped to hurt us badly in the eighties, I think the sophistication
    of capital markets in America today has played a major role in this
    long-term recovery. The ability of people who have good ideas to get
    capital and the kinds of judgments that have been made have been--on the
    whole, have served this country very, very well. So the Telecom Act I
    think had a big role in this.
        I think the fact that we have continued to aggressively invest in
    research, in science and in technology, in biomedical science but in
    other science as well, is going to have a big long-term impact. And I
    believe, over the long run, the fact that we've doubled investment in
    education and training generally and dramatically increased the college-
    going rate will help a lot of companies to sustain their growth and
    their prosperity.
        So I feel good about where we are. And I guess what I would ask all
    of you to think about is--and what I hope the subject of this election
    will be, because I'll be a citizen bystander, not a candidate--is, now
    what?
        I mean, you know, 7 years ago we had high unemployment, low growth;
    we'd quadrupled the debt. The social problems were getting worse, and we
    had total political gridlock. The country's sort of turned around now.
    And almost every--almost every social indicator is better. We have the
    lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years,
    the lowest female unemployment in 40 years, the lowest poverty rate
    among single-parent households--poverty rate--in 46 years. There are
    more people in poverty there because there are so many more single-
    parent households.
        We have very robust movement. And the real question ought to be,
    what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity? And I talked
    about that in length, as Ed Rendell said, I almost put him to sleep in the State of the Union. [Laughter] But
    I would just like to reiterate. It seems to me that these are the
    questions we have to ask.
        And my answer is, number one, we've got to try to keep this economy
    going. And when a downturn comes, we've got to do our best to make sure
    it's minimal in duration and depth, whenever that is. I think continuing
    to pay down the debt is very important. And there is some difference of
    opinion about that. But let me say why.
        We financed--you can't expand the economy this quick without people
    borrowing money and going into debt. People have to borrow money to
    start most businesses. And of course, there's been a lot of consumer
    debt, too, but basically you've got all this business borrowing. I think
    it's served us well. But the net debt of the country can be much less if
    we're continuing to save by paying the Government debt down, and I think
    we ought to keep going. I know a lot of people in the bond market
    disagree with this, but I think we ought to have a goal of making
    America debt-free over the next 13 years because it will lower the
    interest rate structure over the long run. And I think it's good social
    policy.
        You know, the average person--I had an economic analysis given to me
    the other day that said the average person, because of lower interest
    rates over the last 7 years, was saving $2,000 a year on home mortgage
    payments and $200 a year on car payments and college loan payments. So I
    think it's good social policy, and I know it's good economic policy. It
    maintains confidence, and it frees up capital, and it keeps the economy
    in greater balance. So I think that's the first thing.
        The second thing I think we have to do is to try to do more to bring
    prosperity to the people in places where it hasn't reached yet. I think
    that--one of you said to me tonight that you approved of our attempts to
    close the digital divide, but it shouldn't be seen as social policy, it
    ought to be seen as part of our long-term economic strategy to increase
    economic growth.
        If you think about how the American economy can grow, we have to
    find more businesses and more consumers, more employees, and more
    purchasers. We do that by expanding trade. We also do that by expanding
    opportunities to the people in places in this country that

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    haven't yet been a part of it. Some of them are in inner cities; some of
    them are in small rural areas; some of them are on Indian reservations.
        I bought Christmas gifts over the Internet this year to try to show
    that I'm not as hobbled as Al Gore says I am--[laughter]--but also to
    make a point about this. I bought two Christmas gifts from the Lakota
    craftsmen on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where
    the unemployment rate is still 70 percent, 7-0. Now, these people do not
    want to leave the land of their ancestors, and they should not have to
    do so to make a decent life. But they are way away from any kind of big
    market. It's not easy to get there. If you go visit, it's probably
    because you wanted to go out and see Mount Rushmore or the Crazy Horse
    Monument. But the Internet gives them a chance to build an economy
    without moving.
        It's for the same reason I'm trying to make it easier for poor
    people to own cars without losing their food stamps, because two-thirds
    of the new jobs are in suburbs and three-quarters of the people who need
    work are in rural areas and inner cities. Somehow they've got to get
    where the jobs are, even if they're willing to go back to community
    college and train.
        I did an event this week at the White House with a young 24-year-old
    man who lives in a small town near
    Buffalo, New York, who is going back to community college, learning how
    to repair computers. He's a single father with two kids. And under the
    old rules, if he'd gotten a car, he wouldn't have been able to keep his
    food stamps for his kids. This kid is out there doing everything he's
    supposed to do. And there's millions of people like that. We're here
    having a great dinner tonight; there are a lot of people out there who
    have to think about it before they take their kids to McDonald's.
        So I think that there is so much we can do. One of our proposals in
    this budget is to give people the same incentives to invest in poor
    areas in America we give them to invest in Latin America or Asia or
    Africa--which I support, but I think we should have the same incentives
    here.
        And I want to try to do more to set up 1,000 community computer
    centers around the country in areas that wouldn't have them otherwise,
    so that not just kids in the schools with Internet hookups but adults
    can come in and become conversant and figure out how to do it.
        I was out in northern California the other day with some young
    executives at eBay, and they told me over 20,000 people are now making a
    living off eBay, not working for eBay, making a living buying and
    selling. And they said they've done some profiles of these people, and a
    substantial number of them used to be on welfare. And if you believe
    that intelligence is more or less equally distributed and so is good and
    bad luck, there's a lot of other people that could be doing that if we
    could figure out ways to hook them into the future. So I think that's
    very important.
        I think we ought to make access to college universal, which is why I
    want to make college tuition tax-deductible.
        I think we ought to do more to help people balance work and family,
    which is why I want to expand the reach of the family leave law. I was
    told that if I passed the family leave law and signed it, it would hurt
    the American economy. But it's hard to prove. We've had 20 million
    people take some time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was
    sick, and we've got 21 million new jobs. So I think the evidence is--I
    believe most of you work in places where you think, if the people who
    work with you aren't worried sick about their children while they're at
    work, they're more productive and they do better.
        I believe we ought to do more to be a better partner around the
    world, not just with the China-WTO but with the Africa and the Caribbean
    trade initiatives I put up there, with the debt relief to poor countries
    that could be doing more trade with us.
        And these are the kinds of things that I want you to think about. I
    won't go through the whole litany of issues, but a lot of you know a lot
    about this economy. A lot of you have been a big part of it, and you
    live in a dynamic world. The thing that I want most for my country now
    is for this to be a dynamic decisionmaking process in this election. The
    worst thing we could do is to think--and I appreciate what Ed said about
    people who said they supported my policy. But if someone were running
    for President and said, ``Vote for me. I'll do exactly what Bill Clinton
    did,'' I would vote against that person, because I think we should stay
    with the direction of the policy, but we have to keep changing. We have
    to keep seeking new frontiers. We have to keep moving.

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        And Government is no different from your enterprises. Whatever you
    do, it is no different. We still have--we're still bedeviled by some old
    problems. You know, all these hate crimes you see that are so upsetting,
    where somebody gets killed or shot just because of their religion or
    because they're gay or because of their race, that shows you that in
    this most modern of worlds we're still subject to very primitive
    emotions, even in this country; that we still have our more minor
    versions of the conflicts that have engulfed the Balkans, that bedevil
    the Middle East, that torment India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
        So these are the things I want you to think about, because I'm
    convinced that we have a chance that maybe has never before existed in
    my lifetime, to work together as a country to build the future of our
    dreams for our children and be a truly good citizen in the world and to
    benefit from it. And I think we'll make more money doing the right
    things. And that's what I want for my country.
        Now, a lot of you are younger than I am, but a lot of you are about
    my age, and I want to tell you, when I was studying this whole deal
    about this expansion, I noted that the longest expansion in American
    history before this was between 1961 and 1969. And I'll just close with
    this thought. I graduated from high school in 1964. President Kennedy
    was assassinated in 1963. Some people write about the history of the
    last 30 years and American cynicism and all that business, and they say
    it all started then. That's not true.
        I was there. Americans were not cynical after John Kennedy was
    murdered. They were heartbroken but not cynical. And they united behind
    Lyndon Johnson. He won an enormous election mandate. We were passing
    civil rights legislation. And most people believed in 1964, when I
    graduated from high school, that we could keep low unemployment, high
    growth, low inflation going indefinitely. They thought we could actually
    bring opportunity to people in poor areas; there were differences about
    how to do it. And they thought we would solve the civil rights
    challenges of America through the Congress, through the courts, in a
    lawful way. And they thought we would successfully pursue the cold war
    until eventually we prevailed. That's what we thought. In other words,
    we were about as confident then as we are now.
        Two years later, we had riots erupting in our cities. The country
    was becoming divided over Vietnam. The economy began to be unraveled
    over the conflict between guns and butter. Four years later, when I
    graduated from college,* it was 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed,
    2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon
    Johnson said he wouldn't run for President again. The country was
    totally divided over the war in Vietnam. And we elected a President of,
    I think, immense ability, but on a campaign of division. He said he
    represented the Silent Majority, which would mean, I guess, the rest of
    us were in the loud minority. [Laughter] And it was ``us'' against
    ``them.'' And we've been playing ``us'' against ``them'' politics ever
    since.
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        *White House correction.
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        I have done my best to bring an end to that--I'm sure you would
    admit, with decidedly mixed results. But I have done my best to bring an
    end to that, because I'm old enough to know that today's confidence can
    get away in a hurry.
        And I say this to you not as a President but as a person, as an
    American. I have waited now for 35 years for my country to have the
    chance I thought we had 35 years ago. And I don't want us to squander
    it. If somebody asks you why you came here tonight, give them that for
    an answer. And think about, in your own mind and heart, what you think
    we have to do to make the most of this. We've been given a second
    chance, those of you who are my age or older, and we need to make the
    most of it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:15 p.m. at the Restaurant Daniel. In his
    remarks, he referred to Shelby Bryan, event host; Leo J. Russell,
    president, Pride Technologies; former Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd
    Bentsen; and Edward G. Rendell, general chair, Democratic National
    Committee.