[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.