[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1993)]
[Pages 797-805]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Cleveland City Club

 May 10, 1993

    Thank you very much. Well, I don't know what you had for lunch, but 
I wish I'd had some of it. [Laughter] I do want to say I'm delighted to 
be back in Cleveland and glad to be back at the City Club. And I hold 
here in my hand a membership to the City Club given to me by Senator 
Metzenbaum. Now, I'd rather have his vote on all the issues, but I'll 
take this. [Laughter]
    Actually, I want to thank Howard Metzenbaum and Lou Stokes and Eric 
Fingerhut and Congressman Hoke, and all the others who are here, your 
Mayor, your State treasurer, your State attorney general. I'm delighted 
to be here with all of you. I saw in the introduction that you mentioned 
something I was going to say in my own remarks. I very much enjoyed 
being here last year and having the opportunity to talk in Cleveland 
about family values.
    Two years ago, I came here; the Mayor hosted the Democratic 
Leadership Council's national convention. And I said at that time that I 
thought the time had come for us to move beyond the political debate in 
Washington between one party which seemed to have advocated the politics 
of abandonment and another which seemed to advocate a politics of 
entitlement. It seemed to me that time had come for us to face our 
problems squarely as a country and to try to do something about them, 
but not to pretend that the Government could give a solution to the 
American people, solutions to problems that require all of us to give 
something ourselves and to do more. I feel that even more strongly 
today.
    For 110 days, I have lived and worked in Washington, DC. I think 
that all of us would agree that for too long our great Nation's Capital, 
which is filled with monuments to men and women who have done so much to 
bring us to this point in history, has practiced more politics than 
progress. I'm glad to be back here in a place like Cleveland where it's 
not possible to produce more politics than progress. Here you have to 
produce steel or automobiles or biomedical technology, real things with 
real value. This debate in which we are all engaged about America's 
future should properly take place here in the Industrial Belt and in the 
Grain Belt and in the Sun Belt and in the Bible Belt, all across America 
where people live

[[Page 798]]

in a world that is determined by consequences and not by talk.
    If you're a Mayor in a city like Cleveland, you either provided more 
houses and people moved into them, or it didn't happen. There either are 
more economic opportunities, or there aren't. You can measure that. In 
Washington, we're told that the most important thing to do is not more 
than one thing at a time. [Laughter] And some want you to do one thing 
at a time because it's easier to stop one thing at a time than it is a 
whole range of things.
    But I would argue to you, my fellow Americans, that the challenges 
of the moment require both a focus and a discipline on the big problems 
of our Nation and a determination to face them in a comprehensive way. 
The challenge of international competition, new technologies, soaring 
health care costs, defense cuts without an offsetting strategy to invest 
in America, a global recession, a global inability of wealthy countries 
to create new jobs in an open and competitive environment, all these 
things create great new challenges for our country.
    Here in the heartland, I've seen you stepping up to the challenges. 
When the Mayor and I rode in from the airport today, he talked to me 
about how people were moving from the suburbs back into the cities, how 
more houses were being built. I looked at some of your economic 
development projects. I see a partnership between the public and private 
sector here that does not require someone to check his political label 
in when you roll up your sleeves and go to work. That is the sort of 
thing we need to do in Washington and the kind of spirit I hope to be 
able to bring to our Nation's Capital.
    I believe very strongly that in the last 12 years, our Nation's 
Government has collectively produced two immense problems. Problem 
number one, obviously, is the enormous explosion of the national debt 
and the continuing growth of the annual Federal deficit. In 1980, our 
debt was $1 trillion. Today, it's $4 trillion and rising to about two-
thirds of our annual national product, a much bigger percent of our 
annual deficit than, for example, the debt in Japan is. Now, how did it 
happen? It happened partly because we liked it when politicians told us 
what we wanted to hear. It happened because we had big tax cuts and big 
spending increases at the same time. First the spending increases were 
in defense. And then when defense began to be cut, they were totally 
offset, those cuts, by even bigger increases in health care spending 
through Medicare and Medicaid, the fact that one-tenth of America is now 
on food stamps, and by huge increases in interest payments on the 
national debt.
    The deficit is also aggravated by the fact that we index both 
payments to people and income taxes. Now, it's fair to index income 
taxes. If you get pushed by inflation into a higher bracket, we adjust 
the brackets upward. For the first time, that's happened in the last few 
years. No one can doubt that is fair. But consider the impact on that if 
you offset on the one--hello, Congressman Brown, I didn't see you out 
there--you offset, on the one hand, your income, and at the same time 
you promise to pay more out. So everybody that gets a salary or a 
retirement check, their payments go up with inflation even as your 
intake comes down with inflation. So these are the two things that have 
created the kind of problem we have in the budget deficit.
    The second thing that happened, interestingly enough, is that that 
portion of our Government budget which is in partnership with the 
private sector, making investments in our future and promoting economic 
growth, actually shrank as a percentage of the whole and often in 
absolute terms. So that at a time when we are more dependent than ever 
before on how skilled our work force is, the Federal commitment to 
education and training of the work force went down, as other nations 
were exploding their commitment. At a time when we were cutting high 
technology in the defense sector, the peace dividend was not 
automatically reinvested in new technologies in the commercial sector 
and new partnerships. Why? Because, as any Member of Congress here will 
tell you, the easiest place to cut spending is in that broad category 
known as discretionary nondefense spending. That doesn't mean anything. 
That's a lot of gobbledygook. But when you strip it away, a lot of it is 
our investment in our future. So we wind up with this unusual dif- 

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ficulty: a huge debt, an increasing deficit, and a diminished commitment 
to invest in our future.
    The results have been clear: a limited ability to create new jobs, 
even when productivity is growing. We're allegedly in an economic 
recovery of some 17 months in duration, and yet the unemployment rate is 
higher this month than it was at the depths of the recession. We had a 
huge increase in productivity in the last 3 months of last year and in 
the first 3 months of this year, another big increase in output for a 
person in the manufacturing sector. But that money now is being plowed 
back into new technologies or kept for profit, not to increase new jobs. 
As any small-business person here knows, it is difficult to increase 
employment in a small business because of the extra added costs. By the 
time you pay the Social Security and the worker's comp and all the other 
costs, you've got more and more small businesses using overtime workers 
or part-time workers and fewer new jobs being created there.
    So here we are. What are we to do? I have asked the United States 
Congress to adopt a plan that I believe over the next 5 years will do 
something to make real, measurable change in both those areas. It will 
substantially reduce the Federal deficit in the most disciplined deficit 
reduction plan ever presented to Congress, and it will permit some very 
disciplined, targeted increases in those investments which are critical 
to our future. We do it by a combination of things: cutting spending, 
raising taxes, and targeting investment.
    Because this involves a whole lot of change, as you might imagine, 
it challenges a lot of established interests in Washington who would 
prefer that things go on as they are. Because while as a whole our 
country is disadvantaged, I would argue, by what we're doing, certain 
specific groups benefit from everything that is done. Now, the lobbyists 
are lining the corridors of Washington as never before. There are about 
80,000 of them there. And unless all the American people speak out loud 
and clear, it's going to be hard for us to hold this program together. 
There are those fighting for the national interests and those who are 
properly there to be heard about more narrow interests. There are those 
who believe we can make things better and those who believe that any 
change will make things worse for them. There are those who believe we 
can spend money more productively and less wastefully and others who 
believe that we ought to just keep on spending it the way we are now.
    This is the oldest conflict in our history and the eternal battle of 
any great democracy. The impetus for inertia is always strong, and very 
often a country does not have the courage to change until it is almost 
too late. But I believe with all my heart that the voters said last 
November--not just those who voted for me, either--but all the voters 
said, we know this country has got to take a different course. We know 
we can't keep drifting. We know we can't wander. We have to have a plan; 
we have to follow it. We have to try to make some things happen that 
will lift this country's spirits again, lift this country's prospects 
again, and yes, that will insist that all of us have the discipline and 
will and vision to change.
    Now, I think that there are a lot of, I would call them preachers of 
pessimism in our Nation's Capital who underestimate the capacity of the 
American people to know the cost of what is happening to us right now. I 
readily admit that none of these changes can occur unless a vast 
majority of us understand the cost of what is happening to us right now: 
the cost of maintaining this deficit at its present level; the cost of 
maintaining the present health care system; the cost of maintaining a 
system which is underinvesting in our future compared to all of our 
major competitors in a high-wage, high-growth economy; the cost of 
maintaining the credit crunch on small business; the cost of having no 
technology policy; the cost of having no plan to convert from a defense 
to a domestic economy. I would argue that those costs are very high. The 
cost of having no strategy to put young people to work in our cities, 
and instead spending money to pay for the cleanup and the consequences 
of drug problems, gang problems, gun problems--the costs of the status 
quo are very, very high, even when you don't see it directly attributed 
on the Government's ledger books. I believe we don't see that enough.

[[Page 800]]

    So I think we can do more than one thing at once. I think we can 
reduce the deficit and provide the opportunity for all of our young 
people to go to college. I think we can reduce the deficit and provide 
decent job training and education for our working people when the 
average worker will change jobs eight times in a lifetime. I believe we 
can reduce the deficit and put more police on our streets to protect our 
communities better. I believe we can reduce the deficit and offer more 
targeted incentives for real investment to American businesses and to 
their workers. I believe we can reduce the deficit and change the 
welfare system so that we move people from welfare to work after a 
certain amount of time. I believe we can do these things. I believe 
we're strong enough to provide for a budget that reduces the deficit and 
invests in the future in a prudent way. And I can't help noting that 
some of those who say that we can't do that are the very ones that 
brought the debt from $1 trillion to $4 trillion over the last 12 years.
    Our greatest Republican President, perhaps our greatest President, 
Abraham Lincoln, used to tell the story about when he was practicing law 
in Illinois. It kind of reminds me about some of these folks today 
talking about the deficit in Washington. He said it reminded him of a 
man who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the 
court because he was an orphan. [Laughter] I think we've all got to 
understand that we didn't get where we are overnight. We have to accept 
where we are. I don't care about who should bear the blame, but I don't 
think we should have people pointing fingers who helped to create the 
current course of events.
    We should pull together. My whole approach has been to try to say to 
the American people, we are all in this together. If we ask, what's in 
this program for me, instead of what's in it for us, we'll all find 
something we don't like, including me. If the issue is going to be now, 
what's in it for me, instead of what's in it for us, we are defeated 
before we begin. But the what's-in-it-for-me decade didn't work out very 
well for us over the long run, and I think we can do better.
    Now, shortly after I took office I submitted to Congress a blueprint 
of a budget that makes now over 200 specific budget cuts, reduces the 
deficit by over $500 billion over 5 years, and refocuses the priorities 
of our Government from consumption to investment in our future. Both 
Houses of the Congress passed that blueprint in record time; the first 
time in 17 years the budget resolution had passed within the calendar 
required.
    Our commitment to cut the deficit clearly boosted confidence on Wall 
Street, and it's beginning to be felt on Main Street. It is beginning to 
change lives for the better already. Starting after the November 
election, when we announced a clear determination to bring the deficit 
down, interest rates have been going down. The trend line is steady, 
with only minor interruptions whenever there's some sense that maybe we 
won't really reduce this deficit after all. The plan that I announced 
and the outline that Congress adopted clearly played a major role in 
bringing interest rates down to historic lows, mortgage rates to 20-year 
lows. There's been a huge wave of refinancing. I'll bet you anything 
there are lots of people in this room that since November have 
refinanced their home mortgages. I know that there are people in every 
city in America who have gotten business loans, whose consumer loans 
have gone down, whose costs of car financing have gone down.
    It is estimated that in the aggregate, if we can keep these rates 
down just a few more months, this will lead to enough refinancing of 
debt that it will release another $100 billion to be reinvested into 
this economy. That's one and two-thirds percent of our total gross 
domestic product in a given year. That is a huge impetus to stay on the 
track we're on to bring this deficit down. According to a bipartisan 
survey, a poll recently conducted in these conditions, 74 percent of all 
Americans now believe that homeownership is within reach for most young 
people. Do you know that it was a year ago? The reverse, 47 percent. The 
reason for the change is obvious: lower interest rates.
    Businesses are paying less to borrow. That means new investments and 
new jobs. The taxpayers, by the way, are saving billions of dollars in 
financing the Government debt. We've already brought the deficit down 
this year because of those interest rates. Along

[[Page 801]]

with that, we have launched a real effort to attack the credit crunch in 
partnership with community banks all across America, and that should 
mean that farmers, small-business people, and homeowners will be able to 
do even more in the weeks and months ahead. These are things that happen 
when a people take some responsibility for their financial future. 
Having passed the budgetary blueprint, the Congress is now about to move 
into the specifics in what is called the budget reconciliation process. 
That means they've got to take the targets that were adopted in the 
budget resolution and specify how we're going to meet those targets: 
What kind of taxes are going to be raised? What kind of spending is 
going to be cut? What kinds of investments are going to be made? That is 
the process now beginning. And that is the kind of thing that will 
require us all to make tough choices to make good on the results that 
are being achieved. I've asked Congress to join me in making real 
spending cuts, and that process is now unfolding.
    Our budget contains, as I said, over 200 specific cuts. I thought I 
should start as President by setting an example. In the new fiscal year 
we'll be operating the White House with a staff that is 25 percent 
smaller than my predecessor's. I must say, I made that commitment, and 
we're going to do all that work. I have to say, in parenthesis, I didn't 
know that I'd receive more letters in the first 100 days than came into 
the White House in all of 1992. So if you haven't gotten your letter 
answered, hold on, I'm coming. [Laughter] We're trying to do it. We are 
going to reduce just in our office alone $10 million in payroll and 
perks and costs of Government.
    In the executive branch, I have ordered over the next 4 years a 14-
percent cumulative reduction in the administrative costs of the Federal 
Government, 100,000 person reduction in the Federal payroll by 
attrition. That will save well over $9 billion. I have asked the Federal 
employees to have a pay freeze in this coming year and reduced raises in 
all the rest of this first term. I just left the Galleria, and right 
across the street there's a big Federal office building, and a lot of 
those Federal employees said they weren't looking forward particularly 
to doing without a raise next year. We have put the clamps on Federal 
spending, and we have asked Federal employees to make a sacrifice. I 
didn't see how I could ask people to raise their taxes unless the people 
who were getting the tax money also made a sacrifice.
    I come from a rural State where the Rural Electrification Agency, 
the REA, has been very important to my family and our people. They have 
brought life and hope to millions of Americans. But now our country is 
about 100 percent electrified, and I have recommended that we reduce the 
interest subsidies to the REA, something that is tough to do for Members 
of Congress from rural areas and for this President who came from that 
place. I may get shocked instead of light when I go home. [Laughter]
    I've asked the Congress to join me in repealing the special interest 
exemption for lobbying. It's only been in the Tax Code since 1962. 
Before that, it didn't exist. You had to pay if you wanted to go lobby. 
Now the taxpayers actually, at large, bear the burden of people's 
lobbying costs. Now, again, I'm all for people lobbying, and frankly, 
it's a good thing if it's in balance. But I don't see why the taxpayers 
should subsidize someone's costs when they go and try to influence the 
outcome of legislation in Washington.
    I've asked to cut urban programs that don't work. While I plead 
guilty to trying to get more community block grant funds for Mayor White 
so he could build more houses in Cleveland, I also called for the 
abolition of a designated project program at the Housing and Urban 
Development Department because it had no real accountability to the 
taxpayers and cost over $100 million a year.
    I also believe that after all these cuts are in place, if you really 
expect this deficit to be brought down, we have got to raise some more 
tax money. And I believe that we ought to do it in a progressive way. I 
can tell you this just to start out, I have proposed more budget cuts 
and more taxes than I thought I would when I was running, and the reason 
is simple: After the election the Government said the deficit was going 
to be $50 billion a year bigger in 3 of the next 4 years than we 
thought, and $15 billion in the 4th year. The deficit was announced 
after the election in each year to be much, much bigger than had 
previously been forecast.

[[Page 802]]

    So we asked for about 73 percent of the money to be paid for by 
people with incomes above $100,000; the rest to be paid for, 27 percent, 
by the 93 percent or so of us that are under $100,000. And then there is 
an exemption in effect for the energy tax burden for lower middle income 
working people and middle income working people with children up to the 
levels of about $29,000 by the increase in the earned income tax credit, 
which will offset the impact of the energy tax. I think it is a very 
fair program, and I hope it will be adopted.
    We take on the entitlements in this plan. People say, why don't you 
take on the entitlements? I'll tell you why, because people get mad at 
you when you do that. We asked Social Security recipients who are in the 
top 20 percent of income to pay taxes on more of their income than they 
do today, coming from Social Security. We have done our best to restrain 
the exploding costs of Medicare. We have taken on these tough issues to 
cut spending and to raise some money. But I would also argue to you that 
we must have some disciplined increases in investment. And I'll tell you 
where my recommendations are.
    I recommend, first of all, that we focus on rewarding work, 
strengthening families, and creating more jobs, especially for the 
middle class. These ideas include the following--this is where we spend 
money: First of all, in tax cuts to encourage investments for new jobs. 
Private enterprise is, after all, the engine of this economy, not the 
Government, and we need to get it running as close as we can to full 
throttle. So there are substantial new incentives in this program for 
both large business and small business to lower their taxes through 
direct investments. Investments mean lower taxes and more jobs and, 
therefore, more revenue to the Government by putting people to work if 
you target it to investment. I think it's very important.
    Secondly, we focus especially on the depressed areas of the country, 
both rural and urban, with establishing a new network of community 
development banks to make loans to people who want to go into business 
in these areas with special incentives to get others to do the same 
thing. With special kinds of enterprise zones, especially in the urban 
and rural areas which are particularly depressed, that will at least 
give us a chance to see if free enterprise alone can revive these areas 
if the Government gives them enough incentives. These are things I 
believe that will make the private sector work for all Americans.
    The plan also strengthens our schools by providing access to Head 
Start to all children who need it, by setting higher standards 
throughout the country and enshrining in the law the national education 
goals and the standards that they will produce. The plan encourages 
experimentation with things like public school choice and charter 
schools in public school. It contains a bold national apprenticeship 
program where the Federal Government is a partner with the private 
sector and State and local government in helping to retrain the work 
force for a lifetime. We are the only advanced country, the only one, 
that doesn't worry about having a systematic way of training high school 
graduates who don't go on to college. And yet we now have clear 
evidence, in the 1990 census, that anybody who graduates from high 
school but gets no further training or who drops out of high school who 
goes into the work force is likely to have declining earnings. This is 
good money, and it will be really shaped by private sector people and 
public trainers at the local grassroots level, not a national program 
but a national partnership. And it will really, really increase the 
productivity of the American work force.
    This plan also will open the doors of college education to all 
Americans by changing the nature of the student loan program. And I want 
to explain this. Today, the way the student loan program works, you can 
go down to your bank, you borrow the money, you pay it back based on how 
much you borrow. If you don't pay it back, the Government gives the bank 
90 percent of the loan. That's the way it works. The college dropout 
rate is more than twice the high school dropout rate, in part because of 
the cost of a college education. The student loan program is very 
profitable for many banks and for the national mortgage organization 
that's behind it. They have made a killing out of it. It's terrible for 
the taxpayers. Why? Because if somebody defaults on the loan, there's no 
incentive to

[[Page 803]]

go get it because there's a 90 percent Government guarantee. And no 
offense to all of us lawyers in the crowd, but it's going to cost you 
more than 10 percent of the loan to pay a lawyer to go get it. Not only 
that, the repayment terms are often too burdensome.
    Here's what we want to do: Set up a system to make the loans 
directly. Let people pay back the loans only when they go to work, and 
then as a percentage of their income. So no one will ever not be able to 
repay, and no one will be discouraged from taking a lower paying but 
perhaps more rewarding job as a teacher or a police officer or whatever, 
but collect the money at tax time so you cannot beat the bill. Don't let 
people welch on their student loan anymore. And we estimate this system 
can save you $4.3 billion in the next 5 years. That's a lot of money. 
Let me tell you what we'd like to do with that money, or some of it, 
anyway. We'd like to give tens of thousands of our young people the 
opportunity to earn credit against college or pay off their college loan 
by doing community service before, during, or after they go to college: 
working with housing projects, working with environmental projects, 
working to help keep streets safer, working after they graduate as 
teachers or police officers in underserved areas. We can have a program 
of national service that is community based that will help us solve so 
many of our problems.
    I got a letter from a friend of mine, with whom I was in grade 
school, the other day, reminiscing about all kinds of things. And she 
had a very wise thing in this letter. She said, ``You know, somebody 
came up to me the other day and said, `How are we going to save all 
these kids that are in trouble? How are we going to get them back?'.'' 
And she said, ``Without even thinking I said, `We're going to get them 
back just the way we lost them, one at a time'.'' Now, you think about 
that. That's what this national service proposal could do. It could give 
all kinds of young people a chance to do something meaningful to help 
earn credit to go to college and to help solve the problems of Cleveland 
and Cincinnati and Columbus and Dayton and every other community in this 
country. That's the kind of thing that I think is money well spent. And 
we can pay for it if we just have the discipline to make the student 
loan program make sense again. I think we have to do it.
    Let me say, there are many other issues I could talk about, but I 
want to mention one other. I have spent a lot of the last 6 years 
working on the issue of welfare. I have probably spent more time than 
any elected politician talking to people who live on welfare checks. And 
I can tell you that nobody likes the system, least of all most people 
who live on it. But if you want to move people from welfare to work, you 
have to realize three or four basic things. First of all, you've got to 
make work pay; welfare can never be a better deal. Secondly, we've got 
to realize that it's not the welfare check that keeps people on welfare 
as much as it is the child care and the medical coverage for the 
children. Most people on welfare have kids. The third thing you've got 
to realize is that most people, not all but most people on welfare are 
woefully undereducated and can't claim a very good paycheck in the 
market that we're in, not all but a lot. So what is the answer? The 
answer is a comprehensive plan that will empower people to go to work, 
require them to take jobs when they can, and set a date certain beyond 
which no check comes without an effort being made either in a public or 
a private job. That's what I think should be done. We should do away 
with the system as we know it forever. It is a shackle on the spirit of 
millions of Americans, and we can change it.
    Now, here's what we're going to propose. One, in this plan, increase 
the earned income tax credit. You can fill out a form on your taxes and 
get money back if you're eligible for the earned income tax credit. And 
let's fix it so that any American who works 40 hours a week and has a 
child in the house is not in poverty. That is a simple, elemental 
principle that will reduce the incentive of welfare. Second, strengthen 
the system of child support enforcement. Don't lose $20 billion a year 
for people who beat their bills and won't support their kids. Let it 
cross the State lines. Third, provide a system of education and training 
so that people are empowered to do what can be done in this economy. 
Fourth, deal with the health care issue through the national health 
initiative that I'll

[[Page 804]]

say more about in a minute. And then finally, set up a system, it will 
take us a while to do it and to work out the financing, but set up a 
system so that after a certain amount of time, if there is no private 
sector job, to keep drawing a check you must make an effort. I think 
that will be a very good thing. And most people on welfare, once you 
take care of these other issues, will applaud the American people for 
changing that system. Nobody likes the system we've got. We've got to 
have the courage to change it, and I think we will this year.
    Finally, let me say a word about the last issue, which incorporates 
so much of the other. If you want to bring the deficit down to zero, 
which is what our goal ought to be, over a period of years, we must face 
the biggest exploder of the deficit and perhaps the biggest human 
dilemma America faces, and that's the health care crisis.
    This year we're going to spend 15 percent of our income on health 
care. The next nearest country will not spend 10 percent. Now, we should 
be spending more than everybody else for a number of reasons: Number 
one, we do more on medical research than any other country. Number two, 
we rely more on new technologies, and we enjoy that when we need it, as 
opposed to somebody else needing it. Number three, we have a more 
diverse population with more poor people than most other advanced 
countries, more cases of AIDS than most other advanced countries, and we 
are a more violent country than any other advanced country. So we pay 
more money, keeping emergency rooms open on the weekend for people 
getting shot and cut up. [Laughter] You can laugh about it; these are 
true things. Anybody comes and paints some miracle picture on health 
care without telling you the truth is not credible.
    We cannot get our costs down to the level of other nations unless we 
make changes dealing with these big structural things. We can do 
something about this violence if we wanted to, and I'll have more to say 
about that as we go through this term. I've already tried to do too much 
at once, according to the experts. But let me tell you, we cannot 
continue to have health care costs go up at the rate of inflation 
anymore. We cannot do that here. This deficit, no matter how much we 
bring it down in the next 5 years, will start to go right up again 
because health care costs are going up at a projected 12 percent a year 
for the Government. A hundred thousand Americans a month are now losing 
their health insurance, coming right onto the Government rolls: people 
giving up jobs because they have sick children; people giving up health 
insurance to keep the small business from going broke; people giving up 
health insurance because they have to change jobs, and they have 
somebody in their family sick.
    And there are things that can be done about this. We are spending 
about 15 percent of every dollar in health insurance on administrative 
costs and insurance profit. That is exorbitant. It's about a dime a 
dollar more than any other country in the world is spending. The average 
doctor in 1980 was taking home 75 percent of all of the money that came 
into the clinic that he or she brought in, 75 percent. Do you know what 
it is now? Fifty-two percent; lost 23 cents on the dollar. Why? Because 
of paperwork. The blizzard of insurance requirements, the blizzard of 
Government requirements, and a few other things as well. We can do 
something about this.
    Now, the trick is going to be not to spend a lot more money but to 
move the money from where it shouldn't be to where it should. And some 
people will have to pay some more. But we are going to do the very best 
we can to make sure that the people who are entitled to a reduction in 
their insurance bills start to get it right away, and that we phase in 
the burdens of this so that no small business is bankrupt, so that the 
providers are relieved of a lot of these paperwork burdens, and so that 
we can actually both lower the costs to the millions and millions of 
Americans who are entitled to it and stabilize the rate of increase for 
everybody else.
    Now, the nay-sayers can always call any new responsibility that 
anybody assumes, that they are not assuming now, a tax. Five will get 
you ten, they'll never want to give any credit for all the cost 
reductions that will go to the tens of millions of Americans who are 
paying too much now. We have got to do something about this. We are the 
only advanced country in the world that has no system for covering 
everybody, maintaining

[[Page 805]]

health security for working families, and trying to keep costs somewhere 
near inflation. We can do that and preserve everything that is best 
about the American system, keep spending more than everybody else is, 
but not run this country into a ditch. And we've got to do it.
    In order to do it, all of us will have to take a view about the 
national interests that will not enable us to say, what's in it for me? 
We'll have to say, what's in it for us? There are a couple of things 
moving through the Congress that are very hopeful in that regard. One is 
the Senate passed a bill this week, that I strongly support, that 
requires all the lobbyists in Washington to register for a change. Did 
you know they didn't have to register before? A whole bunch of them 
never even registered. And limit very strictly the gifts that any Member 
of Congress can receive without reporting them. They're going to have to 
report the money that all the lobbyists make, and the lawyers.
    And now, we introduced last Friday a new campaign finance reform 
bill that will limit the cost of congressional campaigns, limit the 
influence of political action committees, and open the airwaves to 
challengers and incumbents alike so that the people get a real race 
every time, and pays for it by repealing the deduction for lobbyist 
expenses. I hope that those two things can pass. To get economic reform, 
you're going to have to have political reform. I'm sure of that.
    Bring down the deficit; do it with spending cuts and tax increases. 
No tax increases without the spending cuts. Invest in education and 
training, new technologies, incentives to business, changing the welfare 
system. And have political reform; face health care. That is a big 
agenda, but that is America's agenda. If we're going to bring this 
country back, that is what we must do. I hope you and every American, 
without regard to political party, in good faith, will ask the United 
States Congress to engage these issues this year so that we can move 
this country in the future.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:45 p.m. at the Statler Tower Building. 
In his remarks, he referred to Representatives Lou Stokes and Eric 
Fingerhut.