[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1993)]
[Pages 830-834]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Swearing-In of the Small Business Administrator and 
Honoring the Small Business Person of the Year

 May 12, 1993

    Please sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. It's great to 
see all of you here in the Rose Garden. I want to thank the Members of 
Congress who have joined us for this ceremony, and welcome all of you 
small-business people and your families from all across America here to 
the White House for this important day.
    This is an extra special day to celebrate the winners of the small-
business people of the year awards, because today we're also going to 
have the oath of office for the new Administrator of the Small Business 
Administration, Erskine Bowles. I chose Erskine for

[[Page 831]]

a very simple reason, because he's a business person and not a 
politician.
    Too often in the past, the SBA has been the province of politics too 
much and business too little. This man has devoted his life to helping 
people start businesses, to helping them grow their businesses, to 
helping them reach out beyond the borders of their communities, to State 
and regional and national and international markets. He really 
understands what it's like to start and to keep going a business 
enterprise. His plans for the Agency include a plan to improve the 
management and outreach to determine what we can do to actually create 
more success stories in the small-business community.

    He's already met, I know, with many of you who are here for this 
celebration. But that's just the beginning. I think you will see the 
most energetic, connected, and continuous effort to reach out to small 
business that the SBA has ever given to the American small-business 
community.

    Now, I'd like to introduce Erskine and Judge James Dixon Phillips, 
Jr., of the Court of Appeals of the 4th Circuit in Durham, North 
Carolina, who will administer the oath of office. Erskine's wife, 
Crandall Bowles, will hold the Bible, and then they will take it over 
from there.

    Judge?

[At this point, Judge Phillips administered the oath of office. Mr. 
Bowles expressed his gratitude to the President and enumerated his 
priorities for SBA.]

    Thank you very much. I predict that over the next 4 years, small-
business men and women in every State in America will come to see 
Erskine Bowles as the best advocate they ever had. And I assure you that 
he is going to have a real influence on our economic policy.

    Some evidence of that is the presence here today of the two other 
Members of my Cabinet, Ron Brown, the Secretary of Commerce, and Mickey 
Kantor, our U.S. Trade Representative. We are going to have a 
coordinated policy for small business. We have to have the Commerce 
Department, we have to have the Trade Office, we have to have the 
Treasury Department if we're going to attack all these issues. And I'm 
very, very proud of the team that we've got working on it.
    Let me just mention one or two other things about the small-business 
economy. We have spent most of our time in the last 3 months or so in 
meetings in this White House talking about the economy and talking about 
health care and its impact on the economy. Over and over and over, we 
come back to a central fact of the American economy in the last 12 
years. In every year of the last 12 years, the biggest companies in 
America have reduced employment in this country, even as they were 
increasing productivity, even as their profits went up, even as their 
stock values went through the roof and Wall Street reached all-time 
highs, in every year.

    Some of that is because of being involved in other countries in a 
global economy. A lot of it is just using the technology of new 
productivity to have machines do more work, or have people do more work, 
overtime, and more part-time workers. But the bottom line is, in every 
year employment has been reduced by the biggest businesses in this 
country.

    In every year until about 3 years ago, the reduction in employment 
by big business was more than offset by the increase in employment by 
small businesses in America and by the startup of new businesses. Then, 
about 3 years ago, that too came to a halt because of a national and 
international recession, because of the credit crunch, because of the 
burgeoning costs of health care on smaller businesses and all the extra 
additional costs of hiring one more worker, whether it's worker's comp 
or some other cost or the Social Security costs.

    The extra added costs to small business of hiring additional workers 
meant that, over the last 2 or 3 years, small businesses, even when they 
were growing, have relied more and more on overtime, more and more on 
temporary workers, and less on adding to the job base of America. We 
have talked about this endlessly in these walls here, trying to come up 
with policies that would address that, trying to reward the spirit, the 
grit, the entrepreneurialism, the creativity of you and

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millions of Americans like you all over this country.
    I have seen, I suppose, being a former Governor of a small State, as 
many small businesses up close as virtually anybody who ever occupied 
this office. I have more than a healthy respect for the fact that you 
now employ a majority of America's workers and create a huge majority of 
America's new jobs.
    Just a couple of days ago, as I'm sure you all know, I went out to 
Ohio and to Illinois. And when I finished my speech in downtown 
Cleveland to the City Club, before we went out to the airport, I told my 
entourage with no planning that I wanted to go back to a small business 
that I came across in the primary in Parma, which is a suburb of 
Cleveland, to visit a woman named Mary Poldruhi, who became a friend of 
mine in the election. She started a business called Parma's Pierogis. 
And she did it as a Polish American, and no bank would loan her any 
money. So she got a telephone book and called hundreds of people in the 
telephone book with Polish surnames until she found 80 people who agreed 
to put up $3,000 apiece to start her business, which she runs with her 
family and a couple of friends and which has done very, very well 
indeed.
    That is the sort of spirit and creativity that I'm sure--I see a lot 
of you nodding because you identify with that experience in your own 
lives. I was so impressed with this woman and her family that, 
literally, I was sitting there in Cleveland--we just decided to go back 
and see her and see how the business was doing and what could be done to 
try to stabilize this environment and make it better.
    I want to talk about just two or three of the things we're trying to 
do. Erskine already mentioned the initiative that Secretary Bentsen 
organized to have the five major financial Departments of the Federal 
Government work on trying to simplify regulations and end the credit 
crunch. A lot of business people tell me that it takes a little time for 
the orders we issue in Washington to manifest themselves in the bank 
down the street. And if that's not happening, that is one of the things 
that Erskine Bowles is here to address. We are determined to change the 
environment which has led to so much withdrawing of capital when it 
ought to be out there plentiful now, given the economic conditions, for 
new loans for good prospects.
    Secondly, in the proposal that the Congress is now considering to 
bring the deficit down, there is a sweeping new proposal to provide a 
huge capital gains cuts for new investments and new enterprises to try 
to start more small businesses, and I hope it will have your support. 
We've also asked for an extension of the 25 percent deduction of health 
care costs for the self-employed, which I think is very important.
    Finally, we are in intense negotiations at this moment, as we speak, 
to guarantee that whatever comes out of the House Ways and Means 
Committee in the tax bill will include a substantial increase in 
incentives for small-business people to reinvest in their own companies. 
So these are the kinds of things that I hope will help us to generate 
more jobs and will support your efforts.
    There is also a community development bank initiative and a big 
enterprise zone initiative that I think will help to spark more small 
businesses in distressed areas and rural communities and big cities. But 
over the long run, we also have to have a healthy financial climate in 
the country. And that means that we must pass a budget this year that 
takes a strong step to bring this deficit down.
    Ever since the election was over when the then-Secretary-designate 
of the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, went on television and said we are going 
to have a tough deficit reduction plan and outlined some of the elements 
of it, interest rates have been going down in this country. Mortgage 
rates are at 20-year lows. The business journals say that if we could 
keep interest rates down this low for another few months, over $100 
billion will be released into this economy through refinancing of home 
mortgages and business loans and other things for new investment and new 
opportunities. Now, we know that someday interest rates will go up 
again, but we want it to happen when the economy starts to boom again. 
And we want the interest rates to stay down while we refinance and get 
as much new money as we can at low interest rates back into this 
economy.
    A year ago, only 47 percent of the American people thought, for 
example, that the next generation of Americans would be able

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to afford a new home. Just a couple of weeks ago a bipartisan poll said 
74 percent of the people now think that, because we're making a strong 
effort to bring the deficit down to hold the interest rates down. I wish 
there were easy and painless ways to do that, but it requires cuts and 
tax increases.
    I'm going up to New York after I leave you today to announce at the 
Cooper Union that I am going to support, strongly, the proposition that 
we guarantee the American people two things: number one is, no tax 
increases without the spending cuts, and number two is, that tax 
increases will go to reduce the deficit, by creating a legally separate 
deficit reduction trust fund which will tell you where your money is 
going. I think that this will do as much as anything else we can do to 
make your lives healthier over the long run.
    Let me finally make one last point. We didn't get into our economic 
difficulties overnight nor at the hand of any particular party. There is 
enough blame to go around, and there will be enough credit to go around, 
if we work our way out of it. I want to reiterate what I have tried to 
say since the day I became President: I do not seek a Democratic or a 
Republican resolution of America's problems. I would like for us to 
define an American solution that goes beyond the paralyzing debates of 
the past. In spite of the fact that we've had a little of that here, 
there's also a lot of evidence that we are moving beyond it. We've 
passed a budget resolution in record time. The Congress passed the motor 
voter bill yesterday which had strong opposition, but it's a great 
thing, and the young people of this country are very excited because it 
will make it easier for them to vote.
    In the last election we had more young people voting than any time 
in 20 years, and there was a sense that we could give our political 
system back to the people who are the true owners of it. So I think 
there is every reason to hope that we can still build a sense of 
possibility and hope and progress among people of good faith in both 
parties, and I want to encourage that. And it ought to be rooted in 
ideas and in action, because that's really the sort of thing that 
brought all of you here today.
    I hardly ever have had what you would call a conventional political 
discussion with a small-business person. You know, I mean, if I go in 
and I talk to somebody about, can you afford health care? What's your 
coverage? What are the options? What's the matter with the insurance 
coverage? How big is the pool you're in?--the words Democrat and 
Republican never come up. Somebody says they went down to the bank, and 
they couldn't get a loan, and here were the problems, and look at this 
stack of paper from the Small Business Administration I had to fill out. 
Nobody ever put a political context on it. And I hope that we can focus 
our attention here on our problems and ask openly what should be done 
about them in the same way that you and I would engage if we were just 
having a personal conversation in your place of business.

    The triumphs of the people we honor here today it seems to me, are 
the triumphs of America. The idea that you've got a right to take a 
chance. You've got a right to fail so that you have the right to 
succeed. You're given the opportunity in a free-market economy to bring 
your ideas to bear and see if people respond.

    I have been terribly impressed--I've read the life histories of a 
lot of the award winners that are here today, and not just the three 
that we come to recognize. And I wish I could say something about all of 
you who are represented. But as you know, the purpose of this ceremony 
is to recognize the second runner-up, the first runner-up, and the Small 
Business Person of the Year. I just want to say to all the rest of you, 
we honor your achievements, and we know that these people, in a 
fundamental and profound sense, are reflective of what all of you have 
done.

    For David Parker, success has been what you might call an open-and-
shut case. His Pelican Products of Torrance, California, began as a 
scuba supply manufacturer but now is best known as a maker of suitcases 
and containers that are so hardy they're used in the environmental 
safety industry. They've even survived on a trip to Mt. Everest, 
something I'm not sure I could do. Now, that is a real climb to success. 
I want to ask David to come up here and receive our congratula- 

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tions as a second runner-up in the Small Business Person of the Year.
    Carol Rae was hired as a consultant to the Magnum Diamond 
Corporation. But in no time, she was asked to run the company. Now, I 
can tell you, as somebody who has fooled with a lot of consultants, that 
in itself is an incredible compliment. As president of the business, 
she's made it a leader in surgical tools for eye surgery. The Rapid 
City, South Dakota company has grown from 7 employees to 68 in about 4 
years. That's a very impressive achievement for Carol Rae, our first 
runner-up. Would you please come forward and be recognized?
    Did you hear what she said? ``I'm one of his customers.'' [Laughter]
    Bill Engler, Jr., is the CEO of Kaytee Products, and that makes him 
the biggest employer in Chilton, Wisconsin. Kaytee is a case study of 
making change your friend and not your enemy. The business has been in 
his family since 1866 when it sold feed and grain, something I know a 
little about. [Laughter] But it wasn't until Bill took over 9 years ago 
that the business began a growth explosion. Kaytee now sells only wild 
bird and pet food, and it's gone from 64 employees to 365 workers. Sales 
went up from $10.6 million to more than $70 million. And for his amazing 
accomplishments, Bill Engler, Jr., has been chosen the Small Business 
Person of the Year. Let's bring him up with a hand. [Applause]

[At this point, the President presented Mr. Engler with the award.]

    I want to salute you all. I want to wish you continued success. I 
want to pledge you continued access to this administration. I want to 
ask you now as you leave here to give us the benefit of your ideas, your 
suggestions, your constructive criticisms and help us to bring to the 
White House the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that you have brought to 
your businesses and that we must all bring to the United States.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:02 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White 
House.