[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: GEORGE W. BUSH (2001, Book I)]
[March 23, 2001]
[Pages 291-298]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Chamber of Commerce in Portland
March 23, 2001

    Man, Governor, you fired them up. 
[Laughter] I appreciate so very much, Governor, your being here. I know 
the good people of this State appreciate how you conduct yourself in 
office. Like your predecessor, my friend Jock McKernan, you brought a lot of class to your statehouse. I love 
your style, and I really appreciate

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your focus, because you care about the people of this State. You care 
deeply about the citizens of Maine, and it's clear the citizens of Maine 
appreciate your care for them. So thank you so much for being here.
    Rick, thanks for inviting me. 
[Laughter] Where's the wild man? [Laughter] Wild lady. Thank you all for 
coming today. It's an honor to be here, and it's an honor to be your 
President.
    It's an honor to be traveling with members of the congressional 
delegation. I had the privilege of flying from Washington to Portland 
with your Congressman, Tom Allen. I don't 
know Congressman Allen well. I know he's a smart man--maybe a little 
smarter if he comes around my way more often. [Laughter] But I respect 
Tom's intellect, and I respect his service to the people of Maine. Thank 
you very much, Congressman, for being here.
    And you've got two fantastic United States Senators. Olympia and Susan are smart, 
capable women who aren't afraid to speak their mind, even to the 
President of the United States. [Laughter] As a matter of fact, I'm 
beginning to believe they're not afraid to speak their mind especially 
to the President of the United States. [Laughter] But they care about 
their State; they care about their country. I view them as strong allies 
and good friends. Thank you very much, both, for being here.
    And then of course, there's your mayor. Madam Mayor, I don't know why it is every time I see you, I feel 
like smiling. But I appreciate your friendship. Thanks so much for being 
here.
    Most of the time when I come to this beautiful State, you don't have 
to cross-country ski to get into the auditorium. [Laughter] But I've 
got, obviously, fond memories of this beautiful State. I'm hoping my 
mother invites me back this summer. I'd better 
make sure I behave. [Laughter]
    I'm reminded of the time when I first became the Governor of Texas. 
I went to a dedication for those who served in the Pacific theater in 
World War II. It was in central Texas, a little town called 
Fredericksburg. My mom and dad were there, and Laura, the great First 
Lady of the United States, was there. And I was really looking forward 
to welcoming all the World War II vets. It was a chance to say thanks on 
behalf of the sons and daughters of the great generation. And I said, 
``Mr. President,''--that was for my dad, who was the head of the 
parade--I said, ``welcome.'' And everybody cheered. And I said, 
``Mother.'' Before I could get out another word, the place went wild. 
And I said, ``Well, Mother, it's clear the people of Texas love you, and 
so do I, but you are still telling me what to do after 50 years.'' And a 
guy in a big cowboy hat moved out in the middle of Main Street, 
Fredericksburg, and cupped his hands and screamed at the top of his 
lungs in front of 30,000 constituents, ``You better listen to her too, 
boy.'' [Laughter] I can assure you that the President of the United 
States is listening to his mother. Remember that. [Laughter]
    The reason I thought of Mother is, I 
thought of the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital here at the Maine 
Medical Center. It is a proud moment in her life that the good folks at 
the Maine Medical Center dedicated the hospital for her. I can't think 
of a better--[applause]--it is a privilege--it is a privilege for her to 
have her name on an institution based on love and healing and care. It 
also reminds me of how deep our ties are to the State of Maine. My folks love coming to Maine, 
and they love it a lot. And they can't wait for the snow to melt--
[laughter]--so they can get back up here. But anyway, thanks for your 
hospitality.
    I want to talk a little bit about budgeting and the importance of 
good, sound, commonsense budgeting in Washington, DC. I found it's more 
effective for me to kind of get out of the Nation's Capital and explain 
my budget face to face with folks,

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than to rely upon the filter to do so. Sometimes the facts get kind of 
distorted. Sometimes it's hard to get reality to fight through the 
folks. So let me explain my budget, if you don't mind, and what we 
intend to do with money if we're able to bring fiscal sanity to the 
Nation's Capital.
    Step one on a commonsense budget is to set priorities. It's really 
important for the Governor or the President to use the executive branch 
to set priorities so that those who spend money stay focused. Without 
priorities, the tendency is to try to be all things to all people.
    So the priorities in the budget I submitted are these. One, 
educating our children is a priority. The biggest increase of any 
Department in my budget goes to the Department of Education. I want you 
to also understand, though, I remember where I came from. I came from a 
State--I was a Governor--I firmly trust local folks to run the schools. 
The people who care most about the children in the State of Maine are 
the citizens of Maine. And the Federal Government, while it increases 
spending, must trust the Governors and local authorities. One size does 
not fit all when it comes to educating children. So we increased 
spending. But I look forward to working with the Senators and the 
Congressmen of the--pass power out of Washington, to provide a maximum 
flexibility so that the Governors and school board folks can take money 
and meet and match them to the needs that exist. So step one is an 
accountability--step one of a education reform program is local control 
of schools. It is a redline for me when it comes to Federal legislation.
    But I also know--and I know there is some consternation here in the 
State of Maine about the call to hold people accountable for results. My 
attitude is, if you receive Federal money, you ought to measure to 
determine whether or not the money is being spent properly. I strongly 
believed in Texas, if you received State money, you ought to measure. 
The good news in the State of Maine is, the Governor agrees. You've got strong accountability in the State of 
Maine, and the Federal Government should in no way tell the folks in 
Maine how to devise an accountability system, and we don't intend to do 
so. We trust the local people. All we're saying is, ``You develop a 
system so that no child is left behind.'' How do you know if you don't 
measure? How do you know if you don't hold people accountable? And how 
do you know how to correct problems unless you do measure?
    And guess what happens in a system and States without 
accountability? Children whose parents may not speak English as a first 
language just get moved through the system. It's so much easier to quit 
on an inner-city child. And one of the reasons we've got to insist upon 
accountability and work with States to develop accountability systems is 
so that we're able to detect problems early and solve them before the 
system quits on children.
    Too long we've gone without saying, ``Each child matters.'' For too 
long we've asked a question in our society, ``How old are you? Oh, if 
you're 10, we'll put you here, and if you're 14, we'll put you there.'' 
Instead, we've got to start asking the question, ``What do you know?'' 
And if you don't know what you're supposed to know, we'll make sure you 
do early, before it's too late.
    Another priority of your President is to keep the peace. In order to 
do so, we must boost morale in our military, and it starts with making 
sure our soldiers and sailors are paid better. So the budget I submitted 
to the Congress increases the pay and improves the housing. But morale 
will also be improved by having a clear mission for our military. And 
the mission of our United States military must be: Prepare our troops to 
fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the 
first place.

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    I believe strongly that, as the head of the executive branch, we owe 
it to the people and to the Congress to develop a strategic plan as to 
how best to spend the people's money when it comes to bolstering our 
defenses; that as its Chief Executive of Government, our responsibility 
is to develop a plan about what the military ought to not only look like 
today but what the military ought to look like 20 to 30 years from now, 
so that we can focus taxpayers' money in a responsible, planned way.
    It is irresponsible to spend your money in a haphazard fashion. We 
must not have our defense budgets driven by politics. We must have them 
driven by vision and need, in order to not only effectively spend your 
money but in order to make sure we keep the peace 20 to 30 years from 
now. Military preparedness is a priority of our administration, and so 
is making sure we shepherd the taxpayers' money in a wise way.
    Another priority is health care. The budget I submitted to the 
Congress doubles the Medicare budget--actually, more than doubles the 
Medicare budget. It says that Medicare is an important responsibility 
for our Government. But we also must be bold enough to reform Medicare. 
The Medicare system is ancient. It's meeting some needs but not all 
needs. And everybody, particularly those in the State of Maine, know 
loud and clear that Medicare does not provide prescription drugs for our 
seniors. It is time to seize the moment. It is time to provide our 
seniors a variety of options from which to choose, all of which will 
include prescription drugs.
    I've heard all the talk about Social Security. You can imagine, 
particularly all those ads on TV that said, ``If George Bush becomes the 
President, you're not going to get your Social Security check.'' Well, 
let me tell you, the budget I submitted to the Congress sets aside all 
the money that's supposed to go to Social Security for only one thing: 
Social Security.
    We're going to have a debate on Social Security, as well. The debate 
about where payroll taxes goes is over. Now, some may decide to try to 
hyperventilate on the issue, but it's over. This Congress and this 
President are not going to allow payroll taxes to be spent on anything 
other than Social Security; that's for certain. And anybody who relies 
upon Social Security in your State need not worry. The people who need 
to worry are the younger workers. Those are the folks who need to worry, 
the folks that are coming up that are going to have to pay for the baby 
boomers, like me, when we retire. And so this debate may take a while, 
until the Congress finishes a lot of other business. But we need to have 
the debate about how to make sure the Social Security system is not only 
solvent today but is solvent when the baby boomers begin to retire. And 
I'm going to strongly suggest that one way to do so is to allow younger 
workers, at their choice, to take some of their own money and put it in 
the private markets.
    So we've set priorities. We double the number of folks covered at 
community health centers. This is incredibly important programs. I hope 
you've got--I'm sure you've got some in Maine. They make an enormous 
difference for the indigent and the poor. So in my budget, we double the 
number of people served over the next 5-year period. We work with the 
Congress to make sure the NIH budget gets doubled by the year 2003, a 
commitment the Senators made so we could have adequate research to help 
cure disease in America. We set priorities, and we fund them.
    There's a lot of debate in Washington about debt, and I'm concerned 
about debt, too. In the budget I submitted to the Congress, we pay down 
$2 trillion of debt. That's the biggest debt repayment in the history of 
the world. It's 2 trillion over 10 years. We pay down all the debt in a 
10-year period that comes due.
    And if you hear anybody in Washington talking about, ``Well, let's 
pay down all the debt,'' it means they want the taxpayers to pay a 
premium on debt repayment. It

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doesn't make any sense to pay down debt until it becomes due. Otherwise, 
taxpayers are going to have to pay a premium to do so. That doesn't make 
any common sense to me. It's not wise to try to accelerate debt 
repayment. It costs you too much money to do so. Let's pay down debt 
when it becomes available to be paid down. And that's what we do in this 
budget. So we set priorities and pay down debt.
    Part of the hollering you're hearing out of Washington is the fact 
that my discretionary spending increases at 4 percent. And that's a lot, 
particularly since 4 percent is greater than the rate of inflation, and 
4 percent is greater than the pay raise most working people have gotten 
in America. That's a big, healthy increase, particularly when you're 
talking in terms of billions.
    But the reason why it's created some tension and friction in 
Washington is because it--last time around, they increased discretionary 
spending by 8 percent. All of a sudden, we've gotten a new Chief 
Executive in town that says, let's be fiscally responsible. Instead of 
increasing the size and scope of the Federal Government, instead of 
having a spending contest before we got out of town, let's be 
responsible with the people's money. Listen, 4 percent is plenty of 
growth with discretionary spending.
    We also set aside $1 trillion for contingencies over a 10-year 
period. It could be money to help the farmer. It could be money to--who 
knows what it will be used for, but it's there.
    Now, I know these numbers sound like a lot, but this is reality I'm 
talking about. We've increased discretionary spending by 4 percent; we 
pay down $2 trillion worth of debt; we set aside one trillion in the 
budget over a 10-year period for contingencies; and guess what? There's 
still money left over. And that's the debate. The fundamental question 
is what to do with it. And I start with this premise: The surplus, that 
leftover money, is not the Government's money; it's the people's money.
    And I'll give you another premise. The best way I heard it the other 
day was in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A lady got up, and she said, ``You 
know, Mr. President, I've been a mother and a grandmother, and I love to 
bake cookies. And every time I baked a plate of cookies and put them on 
the table, when my children and grandchildren went through the house, 
they always ate the cookies.''
    And that's how I kind of view tax money in Washington. If it's left 
on the plate--[laughter]--if we leave it on the platter, it's going to 
be spent. And so the fundamental debate is, once priorities are met, 
once we pay down debt, once we set aside money for contingencies, what 
do we do with it? Do we increase the size and scope of the Federal 
Government, or do we trust the people with their own money?
    The last 4 months of--the first 4 months of the fiscal year, the 
cash coming into the Treasury was $40 billion, anticipated. This, in 
spite of the fact that the economy was beginning to slow down a little 
bit--40 billion more than projected. It sounds like, to me, that 
somebody is being overcharged. And so I submitted a plan to the United 
States Congress that remembers where the money came from, that helps 
with fiscal sanity in Washington, DC, a plan that will serve as a second 
wind to an ailing economy, a plan that says that everybody who pays 
taxes ought to get tax relief. It says to the Congress, trying to target 
tax relief is not fair. The role of the Congress and the role of the 
President is not to try to pick and choose who wins or loses when it 
comes to tax policy. If you pay taxes, you ought to get relief.
    And so we've submitted a plan that does just that. It reduces all 
rates on everybody who pays taxes and shrinks the number of rates from 5 
to 4. It increases the child credit from $500 to $1,000. And I want to 
talk about two aspects of the tax relief plan.
    First, the code we have now is incredibly unfair to people who are 
struggling to get

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ahead. And the example I've used over and over again is one I'm going to 
keep using until Congress solves the problem. And it's the single mother 
working hard as she can to raise two children. She's making $22,000 a 
year.
    First of all, she's working the hardest job in America. Secondly, 
for every additional dollar she earns under this code, she pays a higher 
marginal rate than somebody who is successful in America; she begins to 
lose her earned-income tax credit; she gets put in the 15 percent 
bracket; she's paying payroll taxes.
    Under this Tax Code, the people working on the fringes of the middle 
class, struggling hard to get ahead, pay a higher marginal rate than 
somebody who is successful. And that's not right. That's not what 
America is all about, as far as I am concerned.
    America says, the harder you work, the more money you put in your 
pocket, and the easier it is to access the middle class. And we've got 
to change that, and so we dropped the bottom rate from 15 to 10 and 
increased the child credit from 500 to 1,000.
    But I also believe strongly that we need to drop the top rate, as 
well. And I know there's a lot of talk about it in Washington, DC, and 
there's a lot of--by dropping the top rate, it creates all kinds of 
finger pointing and name calling. But I want Members of Congress to 
remember this fact about our Tax Code and about our economy and about 
the American Dream. There are thousands of small-business owners, 
thousands of entrepreneurs who are unincorporated in America, who are 
sole proprietors, who are Subchapter S's, that pay the highest marginal 
rate in the Tax Code. And when you drop the top rate from 39.6 percent 
to 33 percent, we're sending a clear signal that the role of Government 
is not to create wealth, but the role of Government is to create an 
environment in which the entrepreneur can flourish, in which the small 
business can grow to become a big business.
    Our Government must understand: Tax relief will provide capital for 
the small-business owner to be able to expand. Our Government must hear 
loud and clear that by far, the vast majority of job creation comes from 
small businesses and entrepreneurs. And we always must remember, the 
great hope of America, the great dream of our country is for people to 
own their own business and own their own home, to be an owner in our 
country.
    One of the things I'm going to do is fight for the entrepreneurial 
spirit in America. And one way to do so is to drop that top rate, to 
encourage capital formation in the private sector and in the hands of 
our small-business owners all across the country.
    There are two other aspects of tax reform I want to talk about. 
First, our Tax Code sends the wrong signal about family. We penalize 
marriage. It makes no sense to do so. I look forward to working with the 
Congress to change the marriage penalty in the Tax Code. And we also do 
something else that's incredibly unfair. We tax people's assets twice, 
once when they're living and once when they die. And that's not right. 
It's not right for small-business owners; it's not right for Maine 
farmers, Texas ranchers. It's not right to have a death tax, and it's 
time to get rid of it.
    I know these numbers sometimes sound just like they're a bunch of 
numbers and a lot of talk and balance sheets and throwing around zeros 
like it's common-day practice. And I understand that, so what I like to 
do is, I like to put a face on what I'm trying to talk about. I like to 
invite people who will be affected positively by my plans to--and I 
would like to introduce to you the Hanington family today. They're from 
way up East. You're way up there, right on the Canadian border. 
Willard is a small-business owner. It's a 
family-owned logging business. He brought his three children with him 
today. I want to talk about his circumstances right quick.

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    This good family, they're raising Kayla, 
who's 14, and Logan, who's 10, and 
Laci's 2\1/2\ years old. They work hard to 
get ahead. They pay $2,850 of Federal income taxes. And when Congress 
enacts the plan that I've submitted, this good family will save $2,150.
    That's after we've grown the discretionary spending by 4 percent, 
after we've committed ourselves to saving Social Security and 
strengthening it, after we've doubled the Medicare budget, after we've 
provided for the military--there's money left over. And the fundamental 
question, folks, is who do you want spending that $2,150? That's what 
the debate is all about. And I submit to you, it's better for our 
country to trust this good man and his wife to spend their $2,150 than 
the Members of the United States Congress. [Applause] Thank you. I 
appreciate that.
    And that's my budget, and that's my vision. It's based upon, who do 
you trust? I trust the people of this country. If you were in my 
position, you'd trust them, too. I travel--everywhere I go, the people 
of this country are fine and decent and honorable people.
    The Governor and I and Senators and 
the Congressmen just came from the Salvation Army. It's a place based on 
something Government can't create, which is love and concern and deep 
compassion. No government can help. We can spend money, but we cannot 
put hope in the hearts of people. The great strength of this country 
comes as a result of people loving their neighbor and asking the 
fundamental question, ``What can I do to help? What can I do to make my 
community a better place?''
    Oh, this is a fabulous nation. That's why it's such an honor to be 
your President. I think we're making progress, not only on issues, but 
the culture is beginning to change some, in Washington, for the better. 
It's a culture of accomplishment, a culture of achievement.
    Recently the Senate and the House moved a piece of legislation which 
I supported. I understand good folks may not agree. But there was 
excessive regulation getting ready to be placed on large and small 
businesses through what's called ergonomics. And the Congress and the 
Senate took a look at it and said, ``The cost/benefits just doesn't make 
sense. Let's change it and come up with more realistic policy.'' The 
reason I bring that up is, it was a good, sound debate. Both Republicans 
and Democrats supported the measure. It made it to my desk; I signed it. 
But there's a sense of accomplishment, a sense of what we can do 
together for the good of the country that's beginning to become a part 
of the culture in Washington. There's a culture of respect developing in 
Washington.
    I hope in my comments you understand that the Congressman may not 
agree with what I'm trying to do, and I may not necessarily agree with 
every vote, but I respect the man. And we need more of that in our 
Nation's Capital. We need to send the signal that good folks can 
disagree, that there is time for politics and there's time for doing 
what's right for the American people. And I'm going to continue to 
focus--[applause].
    And finally, I hope that we're beginning to develop a culture of 
responsibility in the country. Those of us who hold high office, like 
your Governor, myself, and others, have a 
responsibility to the people, a responsibility to uphold the honor of 
the office. But that's just the beginning; that if we're blessed, we 
have the responsibility to help a neighbor in need; that we must send 
the signal to our children: Make the right choices, be responsible for 
the decisions you make in life.
    No, I think we're making good progress. There's a lot of work to do, 
but it starts with trusting the people. And we're always remembering, 
the great strength of this land lies in the hard-working, good hearts of 
the American people.
    Thank you for coming. God bless.

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Note: The President spoke at 12:18 p.m. at Merrill Auditorium. In his 
remarks, he referred to Gov. Angus S. King, Jr., of Maine; Richard L. 
Bisson, Jr., chairman, Greater Portland Chambers of Commerce; and Mayor 
Cheryl Leeman of Portland, ME. S.J. Res. 6, approved March 20, was 
assigned Public Law No. 107-5.