[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[January 12, 2000]
[Pages 36-42]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council
January 12, 2000

    Thank you. Well, first of all, I think we ought to acknowledge that 
public speaking is not something Jessica does 
every day, and I think she did a terrific job. I thank her for coming 
here. I want to thank Tommy and Sarah and Maggie and Aliza and Grandmother for coming also, so that you would have 
a human, real example of the subject I want to address today and one of 
the biggest reasons I ran for President.
    I thank my old friend Senator Joe Lieberman for his leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council. 
President and Mrs. 
Trachtenberg, thank you for welcoming 
me back to George Washington.
    I want to acknowledge two other people in the audience today without 
whom many of us would never have been able to do what has been done, and 
particularly I am indebted to

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them: first, Will Marshall, who runs the 
Progressive Policy Institute of the DLC, who has been at this for well 
over a decade and come up with so many of the ideas that have been 
hallmarks of our administration. And I want to thank my long-time friend 
Eli Segal, who actually gave birth, in fact, to 
two of our most important ideas. AmeriCorps, our national service 
program--he set AmeriCorps up, and then he set up the Welfare to Work 
Partnership, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being 
hired by private business from the welfare rolls. So thank you both for 
coming here and for what you have done for our country.
    I always get nervous when people start talking about legacies, the 
way Senator Lieberman did. You know, 
alliteration having the appeal it does, it's just one small step from 
legacy to lame duck. I keep hearing that. [Laughter] And I've finally 
figured out what a lame duck is. That's when you show up for a speech 
and no one comes. [Laughter] So thank you for making me feel that we're 
still building on that legacy today.
    I want to put the issue I came here to discuss today, which directly 
affects the Cupp family and so many tens of thousands like them all 
across America, in the larger context of what we have been about since 
1993, in January.
    Eight years ago, when I ran for President, I came here to Washington 
and asked for change in our party, change in our national leadership, 
and change in our country, not change for its own sake but because in 
1992 our Nation was in the grip of economic distress, social decline, 
political gridlock, and discredited Government. The old answers plainly 
were obsolete, and new conditions clearly demanded a new approach.
    By 1992, we in the DLC had been working for some years on a new 
approach, rooted in the basic American values of opportunity, 
responsibility, and community; dedicated to promoting both work and 
family here in the United States and to promoting America's leadership 
around the world for peace and freedom, security, and democracy. We 
believed that Government was neither the primary problem, as the new 
Republicans had been telling us for a decade by then, or the primary 
solution, as many New Deal Democrats still earnestly believed. Instead, 
we asked for a new direction for our National Government, with a focus 
on creating the conditions and providing people the tools to make the 
most of their own lives and a commitment to a partnership with the 
private sector and with State and local government, so that the Federal 
Government would be a catalyst, promoting and experimenting vigorously 
with new ideas. It would be a smaller and less bureaucratic but a more 
active Government.
    Those of us who were in the vanguard of this movement called 
ourselves New Democrats, and we said our agenda was a third way, a way 
to create a vital center that would bring people together and move our 
country forward. But we were also quick to acknowledge that labels don't 
define a politician or a political movement, ideas do.
    Our new ideas were first built on the premise that we had to discard 
the false choices that then defined politics here in our Nation's 
Capital.
    We believed, for example, that we could both eliminate the deficit 
and increase our investment in education, in science and technology, in 
the truly significant national priorities. We believed we could be pro-
business and pro-labor. We believed we could be pro-growth and pro-
environment. We believed we could reform welfare to require those who 
are able to work and still do more for poor children and poor families. 
We believed we could improve education both by raising standards and 
accountability and investing more where it was urgently needed. We 
believed we could help Americans succeed both at work and at home, 
rather than forcing them to make a choice, as so many, regrettably, 
still have to do every single day. We believed we could lower the crime 
rate both with more effective punishment and with more effective 
prevention. We believed we could lead the world with greater military 
strength and more diplomatic aid and cooperative efforts with other 
nations.
    We had a whole lot of new policy ideas that we implemented. I'll 
just mention a few: the empowerment zone program and the reinventing 
Government program that the Vice President's led so brilliantly; community development financial 
institutions; AmeriCorps, which now has given over 150,000 young 
Americans the chance to serve in their community and to earn some money 
for a college education; the HOPE scholarships, which along with our 
other college incentives have effectively opened the doors of college to 
all Americans; the V-chip; trade, with environmental and labor 
considerations taken

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into account; after-school programs; 100,000 police; the Brady bill; the 
family and medical leave law; the assault weapons ban; housing vouchers 
for people on welfare to move closer to where the jobs are; 
environmental right-to-know laws; and many, many other ideas, all within 
this basic framework of opportunity, responsibility, and community, all 
with a view toward a Government that was less bureaucratic but more 
active.
    Today, we're in a position to make an assessment--very different 
from 1992. In 1992 Al Gore and I went around the country and made an 
argument to the American people, and they took a chance on us. And our 
friends in the Republican Party said, even after I got elected 
President, that none of it would work. They said our economic plan would 
explode the deficit and bring on another recession. They said our crime 
bill, with 100,000 police and the assault weapons ban and the Brady 
bill, would do nothing to lower the crime rate or the murder rate. And I 
could go on and on and on, through issue after issue after issue.
    Well, back in 1992, it was, after all, just an argument, and the 
American people took a chance. Now I think we can safely say the 
argument is over, for one simple reason: It has been put to rest by the 
record. We have been fortunate enough to implement virtually all the 
ideas that were advocated in the 1992 campaign and most of those 
advanced in the '96 campaign. And we now have 7 years of measurable 
results. Some of them were mentioned by Senator Lieberman, but I think 
it's worth going over again, to set the stage for the point I want to 
make, which is the more important one.
    We have the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years, the 
lowest unemployment rate and the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years, 
over 20 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the 
lowest murder rate in 30 years, the first back-to-back surpluses in our 
budget in 42 years, the highest homeownership in history. And in just a 
few weeks, now, we'll have the longest economic expansion in the history 
of the country, including those when we were fully mobilized for 
wartime.
    In addition to that, there has been a definite improvement in the 
social complexion of America. We have the lowest child poverty rate in 
more than 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the 
lowest African-American unemployment and poverty rates ever recorded, 
the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate ever, the lowest Hispanic poverty 
rate in 25 years, the lowest poverty rate among single-parent households 
in 46 years.
    Along the way, we have immunized 90 percent of our children against 
serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of America. 
We have 2 million more kids out of poverty and 2 million more children 
with health insurance. Twenty million people have taken advantage of the 
family and medical leave law. Over 450,000 people have been denied the 
right to buy a handgun because they were felons, fugitives, or stalkers, 
under the Brady bill. We have cleaner air, cleaner water. We have 
cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps as in the previous 12 
years.
    And yesterday I had the privilege to go to the Grand Canyon to set 
aside another million acres of land. Now, in the lower 48 States, we 
have protected more land than any administration in American history, 
except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.
    Our country has helped to further the cause of peace from Northern 
Ireland to the Middle East to Bosnia and Kosovo to Haiti; established 
new partnerships with Latin America, Asia, and Africa for economic 
cooperation; restrained the nuclear missile programs of North Korea; 
fought against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program; worked to 
reduce the threat of terrorism, chemical and biological weapons; cut 
thousands of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of Russia and the United 
States; expanded NATO; increased our debt relief and economic assistance 
to the poorest countries of the world. We have helped to minimize 
economic problems in Asia and Mexico and concluded over 270 trade 
agreements, all with a view toward implementing the basic ideas that 
were articulated in 1992 and developed in the years before through the 
Democratic Leadership Council.
    Now what does that mean in practical terms to all of you and 
especially to the young people in this audience? It means for the first 
time in my lifetime, we begin a new century with greater prosperity, 
greater social progress, greater national self-confidence, with the 
absence of an internal crisis or an external threat that could derail 
our further forward movement. This has never happened in my lifetime.
    The first time I came to George Washington University was in 
September of 1964, to a Judy Collins concert in Lisner Auditorium. 
[Laughter] I remember it well. Some of you were not alive

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then, maybe more than half of you. That's the last time we had this sort 
of economic growth and this kind of range of interest in our country 
toward helping people who had been left out and left behind or were in 
distress. But we were unable to resolve the civil rights challenge at 
home without major crises, including riots in our cities, and our 
efforts to deal with that came a cropper with the costs and the burden 
of carrying on the war in Vietnam.
    In my lifetime, we have never had a chance like this--never. And I 
would argue to you that the most important question today is not what 
we've done for the last 7 years in turning the ship of state around and 
moving America forward, but what are we going to do now that we have the 
chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children? 
That's the most important thing. I am gratified by all the results that 
I just recounted to you, but after all, that's what you hired me to do. 
And that's what our administration signed on to do.
    The question is, what are we going to do now? What will you do, as 
citizens, when I am no longer here and I'm just a citizen like you? As a 
country, what will be our driving vision?
    The thing I worry about most is that when people have been through 
tough times and they've achieved a lot, the first thing that you want to 
do is sort of relax. And most everybody here who's lived any number of 
years can remember at least once in his or her life when you made a 
mistake by getting distracted or short-sighted because things seemed to 
be going so well you didn't think you had to think about anything else. 
That can happen to a country just as it can happen to a person, a 
family, or a business. So the great challenge for us today is to make up 
our minds, what are we going to do with this magic moment of promise?
    What I want us to do is to put our partisan divisions aside to 
complete the unfinished business of the last century, including things 
like the Patients' Bill of Rights, sensible legislation to keep guns out 
of the hands of criminals and children, the hate crimes legislation, all 
the things that were still on the agenda when Congress went home, but to 
deal with these big, long-term challenges.
    What are they? The aging of America--the number of people over 65 
will double in the next 30 years. I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] 
The children of America, the largest and most diverse group ever--in a 
globalized information society, education is more important than ever, 
and we must give all of them a world-class education.
    We can make America--yes, we've got the lowest crime rate in over 25 
years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years--no one believes it's the 
safest--safe as it ought to be here. We ought to dedicate ourselves to 
making America the safest big country in the world.
    We've proved that we can improve the environment and grow the 
economy, but we still aren't taking the challenge of global warming 
seriously. And we still not have said explicitly, ``The world has 
changed; it is no longer necessary to grow rich by despoiling the 
environment. In fact, you can generate more wealth over a longer period 
of time by improving the environment.'' America ought to prove that, 
instead of continuing to be a problem and having our heads in the sand 
on the issue of climate change.
    We ought to dedicate ourselves not just to running surpluses but to 
getting America out of debt for the first time since 1835, so that all 
the young people here will have lower interest rates and a healthier 
economy throughout their adult lifetime. We ought to dedicate ourselves 
to bringing opportunity to the people and places who have been left 
behind. We ought to dedicate ourselves to building a world in which 
there is a more human face on the global economy and in which we work 
with our friends and neighbors to deal with the new threats of 
terrorism, ethnic, racial, and religious warfare, and chemical and 
biological weapons.
    And we ought to recognize that in a world in which we know the most 
important job is still--is still--the job that Jessica and her husband have taken on 
of raising these three 
children, we cannot allow--we cannot allow--our 
country to be a place where you have to make a decision about to whether 
succeed at home or to succeed at work. Because if we ever get to the 
point where a significant number of our people have to make that 
decision, we are in serious trouble. And too many have to make it every 
day, anyway, because they can't afford child care, or because of the 
burdens of the basic cost of raising their children in dignity and good 
health imposed on their limited ability to earn money, even in this 
prosperous economy. And that's the thing I want to focus on today, 
because I think when the American

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family is doing well, the family of America does well.
    In the State of the Union Address, I will put forth my last but 
still a new agenda, rooted in responsibility, designed to create a 
wider, stronger, more inclusive American community and to create new 
opportunity. Today I want to talk about one important element of the new 
opportunity agenda.
    We know that we are now in a position to do more to create 
opportunity or, as Senator Lieberman and Al From say, to expand the 
winner's circle, to include men, women, and children still at the 
margins of society who are willing to work and ought to be rewarded for 
it.
    The ideas that I will advance in the State of the Union will be 
built on what we have been talking about since 1992, advancing our 
understanding of what opportunity means in the information age. For 
example, once textbooks were central to a child's understanding in 
education; today, computers are. Once a ninth-grade education was all 
anyone needed for a job, then a high school education; today, the only 
people who have good chances of getting jobs which will grow over time 
in income, over a longer period of time, are those who have at least 2 
years of some sort of post-high-school education and training.
    One new opportunity agenda tries to take account of these new 
demands but also the new pressures on working families, including the 
need for quality, affordable child care and the importance of being able 
to access health care.
    The main idea here is still the old idea of the American dream, that 
if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life 
and a chance for your children to have a better one. That's been the 
basic goal of so much of what we've done, from the earned-income tax 
credit to the empowerment zone program the Vice President ran, to the microcredit program the First Lady's done so much to advance, to increasing the 
minimum wage, to greater access to health care and child care, to the 
partnerships that we have made with so many American businesses to help 
people move from welfare to work.
    Now, I will have more to say about all these other ideas later. But 
I just want to talk a little bit today, in closing, about what we should 
do with the earned-income tax credit, something that you've heard 
Jessica say has already helped the Cupp family 
to raise their children but something that is not as helpful now as it 
was when they first drew it.
    In my State of the Union Address and in my budget for 2001, I will 
propose a substantial increase in the earned-income tax credit. It's a 
targeted tax cut for low income working families.
    In 1992, as has already been said, one of the first things that I 
did as President was to ask Congress to dramatically expand the EITC. It 
had been on the books for some time. It had been broadly supported by 
Democrats and Republicans. President Reagan had hailed it. Everybody 
seemed to like it, because basically it involved a tax credit for people 
who were working and had children--almost all of them have children--and 
who just didn't have enough to get along on.
    It is not just another acronym. The EITC was anonymous, I think, in 
America until a previous Congress tried to do something to it, and then 
all of a sudden it became something we all knew about and liked, which 
was immensely gratifying to me. But the EITC stands for, again I will 
say, the E is about ``earned.'' It's about working. It's about a 
fundamental American value. It's about rewarding people who do what 
they're supposed to do.
    I think every one of you, when Jessica was 
up here talking, describing the conditions of their children's birth, 
their work histories, how they had worked hard to provide a decent home 
for their kids, every one of us was sitting here pulling for them. Every 
one of you identified with their struggle. Every one of you could 
imagine what it would have been like to be the father in the delivery 
room and see these kids come out, one, two, three. [Laughter] Every one 
of you. That's what this country is all about, the dignity, the 
struggles, the triumphs, the joys of daily life that we all share.
    And I think our Government has a responsibility, as part of our 
basic compact with the American people, to make sure that families like 
the Cupps find that work does pay, to make sure that we reward work and 
that we enable them to succeed at their even more important job, raising 
those three little girls. It is still, I will say again, society's most 
important job. And I suspect that every parent in this room today agrees 
with me about that.

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    So these incentives to work are just as important to how life plays 
out for millions of Americans as the rate of economic growth or interest 
rates or debt reduction. Studies from Harvard to Wisconsin have 
confirmed that the EITC is an enormously powerful incentive to work. It 
encourages people who are on welfare, who are unemployed, to move into 
the work force, even in modest-paying jobs, because their income will 
be, in effect, increased; they'll get a check at the end of the year as 
a credit against the taxes they pay, because they're working hard for 
modest income.
    Now, in 1998 the EITC helped more than 4.3 million people make that 
move. That's double the number that were being helped in 1993, when we 
advocated the expansion. This tax credit is a major reason, along with 
the strength of the economy, the rise in the minimum wage, and the 
movement from welfare to work, that there are fewer people in poverty 
today than there have been in over 20 years. It explains why the child 
poverty rate is lower than it's been in over 20 years and why poverty 
among African-American children is the lowest on record and the lowest 
among a quarter century among Hispanic children.
    Now, because we know this works, and we know there are still far too 
many families and children in or near poverty and far too many people 
struggling and working, having a tough time taking care of their 
children, we know there is more to do. Today I am proposing the 
following changes in the EITC.
    First, I want to eliminate the marriage penalty exacted by the EITC 
to make sure that the tax credit rewards marriage and family just as it 
rewards work. It's a big problem.
    Second--the next two are very important to the Cupp family; they 
will affect all the families in our country like them, and there are a 
lot of them--I am proposing to expand the EITC for families with three 
or more children.
    The pressures on these families rise as their ranks increase. 
Twenty-eight percent of them--let me say that again--28 percent of them 
are in poverty, more than twice the rate for smaller families. Our plan 
would provide these families tax relief that is up to $1,200 more than 
what they now receive. The way the EITC works now, it's a really good 
deal if you're working for a very modest income and you have two kids. 
But the benefits drop off dramatically after that. And I don't think we 
ought to make these folks choose among those little girls and others in 
their situation.
    Now, the third thing we're going to do is to give more people more 
incentives to continue to work their way into the middle class. You 
heard Jessica say that when her husband's income 
reached $30,000, the EITC benefit dropped off dramatically. We set these 
ceilings back in 1993, and they haven't been really adjusted since then. 
What we want to do now is to phase the EITC credit out more gradually. 
It has to be phased out, but if it's phased out too sharply, then there 
is, in effect, for families with a lot of kids, almost no net gain to 
earning a higher income. And if he's going to work longer than 40 hours 
a week and he's going to miss more hours at home with those kids, then 
we want him to receive the benefits of that. And again, I say, this is 
not just about this one family; they represent millions of people in 
this country.
    So that's what we're going to do: Eliminate the marriage penalty, 
increase aid to families with three or more kids, and phase the credit 
out more gradually, so there's always an incentive to keep working to 
improve your income and your ability to support your children.
    Now, for families like the Cupps, these new initiatives would mean 
an additional tax credit of $850. That would help them to provide for 
their children or own a home or buy a car that makes it easier to get to 
work and, therefore, to work.
    We dedicate $21 billion to these priorities over 10 years, 
increasing our investment in people without in any way undermining our 
commitment to a balanced budget and to getting us out of debt over the 
next 15 years.
    Opportunity for all is a measure of not only how far we've come and 
where we're going but what kind of people we are. Robert Kennedy once 
said, ``Our society, all our values, are views of each other and our own 
self-esteem.'' The contribution we can make to ourselves, our families, 
and the community around us--all these things are built on the work we 
do.
    The young people here, the students here, are probably beginning to 
think about the work you will do. I hope because you're getting a good 
education, more than anything else, you'll be able to do something that 
you love. And if you do something that you love, I believe that you 
ought to be properly rewarded for it and that you ought also to have the 
freedom

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to raise a strong family while you're doing it. That's what today is all 
about.
    And if there is anything that America ought to be about in the 21st 
century, it ought to be about finally really creating opportunity for 
all, a responsible nation of all citizens, and a community in which 
everyone has the chance to do the most important work of all: raise 
strong, healthy, happy children.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:45 p.m. in the Dorothy Betts Marvin 
Theatre at George Washington University. In his remarks, he referred to 
Jessica Cupp, who introduced the President, her husband, Tommy, and 
their triplets Sarah, Maggie, and Aliza; Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, 
founder, New Democrat Network; Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president, 
George Washington University, and his wife, Francine Zorn Trachtenberg; 
William Marshall, president and founder, Progressive Policy Institute; 
Eli Segal, president, Welfare to Work Partnership; and Al From, 
president, Democratic Leadership Council.