[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.