[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 30 (Monday, August 2, 1993)]
[Pages 1443-1451]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Conference on the Future of the American Workplace in 
Chicago, Illinois

 July 26, 1993

    The President. Thank you very much. Senator Simon, Senator Moseley-
Braun, Mayor Daley, President Gross, and my friends and colleagues 
Secretaries Brown and Reich, and to all of you in the audience, my old 
colleague Governor Caperton and the distinguished business and labor 
leaders from all across America.
    This has already been a little bit of fun for me. I never thought 
I'd see Carol Moseley-Braun blush. [Laughter] But I will say this: You 
can call me anything you want as long as you don't take out after me 
like you did Jesse Helms the other day. [Laughter]
    I want to say a special word of appreciation to Mayor Daley for 
talking about the Chicago Laboratory for Change, because it really is 
sort of symbolic of what we're trying to do all across the country, the 
kind of partnership between government and business and labor and social 
service agencies to try to put low income people into the work force, 
into independence, and away from dependence. And I'm very excited about 
that.
    I talked to President Gross before we came in about the history of 
Roosevelt University, a very appropriate place to be cosponsoring this 
event. I'd also be remiss if I didn't thank Adele Simmons, the president 
of McArthur Foundation, for that foundation's support for this 
conference and the Joyce Foundation for supporting the conference. I'd 
like to acknowledge in the audience--I believe she's here--the Reverend 
Willie Barrow, the chairwoman of Operation Push. They held a conference 
on economic empowerment this week here, and I want to talk a little more 
about that later, but until we find a way to reward the working poor

[[Page 1444]]

and to move people from welfare to work and to make it attractive for 
people to invest in distressed areas of this country, our economic 
recovery is going to be limited. Finally, let me say a special word of 
appreciation to Secretaries Brown and Reich for their work on this 
conference.
    And there's one group of American workers I really want to 
acknowledge today. This is the third anniversary of one of our most 
important civil rights laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act. For 
more than 40 million people, this law is clearing the barriers to full 
participation in American life, making real the whole pledge that we 
often say that we don't have a person to waste. This morning in 
Washington I ran a 5K race with a group of astonishingly able disabled 
Americans: two who raced in their chairs who had raced all over the 
world; one marathon runner who happened to be blind; one woman who had 
MS and made a terrific race around the 5K track, kept the pace all the 
way; one amputee who had once run a 62-mile race in one day on a 
prosthesis and today made the 5K around on his crutches just to prove he 
could do that, too. The kinds of achievements that these people have 
demonstrated athletically are demonstrated even more profoundly in the 
work force every day. We need them, and I am proud of that law.
    I am glad to be here in Chicago to discuss this subject today--the 
city that works, the city of big shoulders, all that. You need to know 
why I'm glad to be here, because in a very real way, I would not be here 
as President if it weren't for Chicago. And the economic forces that 
bring us here to discuss this subject today help to explain that.
    I was once at a meeting here in 1988 over at the South Shore 
Development Bank, and I discovered that three city councilmen, two or 
three Democratic ward chairs, and a significant portion of the business 
community in this city came from Arkansas, and it was no accident. If 
you've ever read Al Hawkis--you ought to read John Johnson's 
autobiography here, which might be subtitled, ``How I Escaped the Abject 
Poverty of Arkansas City and Came to Chicago and Became a Big Cheese.'' 
[Laughter] It is a story that has millions of replications: people in 
the South who couldn't make a living in the Great Depression leaving in 
massive numbers from the farms and small towns; coming to Chicago, 
coming to Detroit; finding a way to get into the factories or start a 
business, at the least; becoming middle class Americans; earning a 
decent wage with a rising paycheck and a good retirement and health care 
benefits and enough to buy a home and take a vacation and send your kids 
to college.
    It was the American dream. And when I began running for President I 
found myself deluged with people in Chicago who had roots in my 
hometown, in my home State. We had two delegates here, two who were born 
in the same little town in Arkansas that my Chief of Staff and I were 
born in, in the Chicago delegation. There's a whole town in Michigan 
where 90 percent of the people who live in this little town were born in 
my State. They all came looking for a different life. And that's what 
basically worked for us. Then eventually, the industrialization which 
bloomed first here spread back to the South.
    In the year I was born, my home State's per capita income was only 
56 percent of the national average. Mississippi's was only 48 percent. 
The postwar economic boom of America by the late seventies had taken the 
entire South to about 87 percent of the national average in per capita 
income. And it was projected that the region would equal or exceed the 
national average of per capita income by the turn of the century. But 
then the economic slowdown of the last 20 years hit everywhere and hit 
those who were less well-educated, more rural, less able to compete in 
the global economy, even harder.
    And I say that's what's important to bring us here today because I 
got to this job by being a Governor for 12 years in a State where I 
focused almost exclusively on the subjects and the triumphs and the 
tribulations that will be discussed here today, on jobs and education 
and partnerships and productivity. And when I became Governor for my 
second term in 1983, my State's unemployment rate was almost 3 points 
higher than the national average. In every month but one until 1992, we 
were above the national average in unemployment. Then in 1992, we were 
first or second in job creation. And in 1993, the State enjoys an 
unemploy- 

[[Page 1445]]

ment rate that I think is still too high but is well below the national 
average.
    The point I want to make is this: The issues we are discussing today 
in terms of the big, sweeping developments in America have been of at 
least 20 years in building. The policies we need to change have been in 
place for a good long while nationally. You know what works in the 
workplace. You know that partnership works. You know that investment in 
new technology works. You know that flexibility works. You know that 
being competitive works. You know that treating people like assets 
instead of something that is expendable is very important. We need to 
figure out how to write that large in national policy and then be better 
partners with you in what you do.
    And one of the things that I understand very clearly because I have 
been a Governor is that nothing I do as President can be fully 
successful unless it makes sense and works with what all of you are 
doing. And what I want to talk to you about today is how we can be 
better partners and what we can do to meet the challenges of this time, 
because it's much more complex than it was after the Great Depression 
and after the Second War, when people at least, even though it pained 
them to do so, could leave their little farms in Texas and Arkansas and 
Alabama and Mississippi and come to Chicago or come to Detroit or go to 
Pittsburgh or go out to California, and know they could get a job and 
hope that when they retire they could come home.
    Now the whole country is caught up in a global economy which, to be 
sure, is always affecting different States and communities in different 
ways, but essentially has some broad, sweeping characterizations that we 
have to work to reverse. And to make it more complicated, all over the 
world the wealthiest countries are having many of the same problems we 
are. I just returned from Tokyo from a meeting of the great industrial 
powers of the world. And we find that all of them are having trouble 
promoting economic growth, all of them are having trouble generating new 
jobs, and in the 1980's, all of them found an increase in inequality of 
income and greater difficulty in creating new jobs, even when their 
economies were growing. So that it is clear that we are dealing with a 
very complicated issue and that no one has all the answers.
    Still it is clear that some things have to be faced. We know that 
every nation competes in a global marketplace where money management and 
technology are increasingly mobile. We know that increased productivity 
and new technologies often mean that more output can be produced with 
fewer people and that not always now, as was in the case for the last 
four decades--when that happened before, it was always new and different 
jobs waiting for those people, so that technology was always a winner. 
Productivity was always a winner. It always was a net expansionary 
force. We've always had changes. People have always been moving in and 
out of jobs. No one can freeze-frame any form of human work and make 
sure it will always be there in just that way forever. But we know now 
that for the last 20 years we have seen a steady erosion of the security 
of average middle class people who work hard and play by the rules, 
because we have not been able to make the adjustments necessary in this 
new and different global economy.
    We know that we can only meet the challenge if we begin with a very 
basic fact, the one that you are here to celebrate today and to 
elucidate: The most precious asset any nation has is the people who live 
there and that as long as the people who live there are willing to do 
what it takes to learn more, to do better, to be smarter, to stay ahead 
of the curve, there are going to be opportunities. We also know that 
most jobs in every society now are going to be created by the private 
sector and by what people do or do not do to be more productive, to 
reach out to new markets, to develop new products and services. And the 
third thing we know is that Government policy makes a difference at home 
and abroad. It does make a difference.
    For more than two centuries our country has built prosperity by 
investing in our people and our technology and our future. We have, in 
other words, followed the policy that I have called putting people 
first. We invested in our skills through a public school system, through 
the land grant colleges, through expanding opportunities through the GI 
bill after the war, our investments in canals and in railroads and 
highway systems

[[Page 1446]]

and mass transit, all of these things have helped to make us more 
productive. We've developed cutting-edge technologies through national 
defense; through the space program; and to a lesser extent in the past, 
but it must be more in the future, toward civilian partnerships for new 
technologies.
    But for 20 years we still have seen most Americans working harder 
for less money. And we have not developed an adequate response to the 
new global economy. For at least a dozen years, our country has pursued 
policies that are popular in the short run but very limiting in the long 
run. We have, to be popular in the short run, reduced taxes and 
increased the deficit in a way that has taken our national debt in 12 
years from $1 to $4 trillion and our annual deficit from about $73 to a 
projected $311 when I took office.
    At the same time, we have miraculously managed to reduce our 
national investment in the education skills and technology that our 
people need to grow in the future, a mathematical sleight of hand that 
is almost inconceivable when I tell people about it, but it's true. Why? 
Because we keep spending more on the same health care and more on 
interest on the debt. So that the people you think of in Washington as 
being to blame for big spending and big deficits because they're 
spending more on programs are, in fact, by and large, spending less on 
programs that would help you to do your job better. But because there 
has not been a disciplined effort to bring down the deficit, a 
disciplined effort to bring health care costs in line with inflation, 
which would bring interest rates down there and then reduce what we have 
to spend servicing the debt, we are actually spending more and getting 
less for it, the worst of all worlds.
    This has continued the downward pressure on wages and job growth. 
And every working family in America has felt its impact. Between 1972 
and 1992, while the work year got longer for Americans, average hourly 
wages actually dropped by 10 percent. The 75 percent of our workers who 
don't have 4-year college degrees felt it most profoundly. For those who 
began but didn't complete college, wages fell 10 percent from 1979 
through 1991; for those who didn't go on to college, wages fell 17 
percent; for those who left high school, wages dropped 24 percent.
    It is, of course, perhaps enough to say to explain this, that as we 
move into a global economy where what you earn depends on what you can 
learn, many of those people could not command more in a global labor 
marketplace. But that is an insufficient response if you want to keep 
the American dream alive, you want to keep the morale and the spirit of 
America moving forward, and those of you who are employers want to be in 
a workplace where people are productive because they are happy and 
constructive and an important part of a team. In other words, it is not 
enough just to say that we're in this terribly difficult period that it 
took 20 years to build and that no one knows exactly what caused it. We 
simply cannot go gently into a good night of limited economic 
expectations, slow growth, no growth in living standards, and a lesser 
future for our children. It is not the American way.
    We know that it may take us a good deal of time to work out of this, 
and we know there may be no simple answers or silver bullets, but we 
have got to do better at building a future for ourselves. Of course, we 
have a rare opportunity to do it because the cold war is over; because 
democracy and free markets are in favor and flower throughout the world; 
because a global economy creates opportunities as well as challenges and 
hazards for us because there are new things which have to be done. We 
have to find a way, for example, to make money out of the global 
environmental crisis and make jobs out of it, and I believe we can. And 
in many ways, the challenges we face today are ready-made for Americans, 
with our love of learning, our proven genius at innovation, our far 
greater flexibility than any of our competitors, and our capacity for 
communicating with people among different cultures. After all, we have 
at least one county in this country with people from 150 different 
racial and ethnic groups. It need not be a weakness; it can be an 
enormous asset for us as we move into a global society.
    But we know we have to stop doing some things and to start doing 
some other things. Put simply, we have to stop borrowing so

[[Page 1447]]

much from our future and start investing more to build it again. We need 
fundamental changes, and we have to do a lot of things at once. And 
therefore, our administration is trying to do a number of things in a 
short time: to reduce the deficit, to improve education through our 
schools, through opening the doors of college, through reforming the 
system by which we support those of you who want to train your own 
workers. We need to reward work and reform welfare. We cannot continue 
to spend 30 percent more than any other country in the world of our 
income on health care.
    Many of you today here work in companies or represent workers who do 
not have jobs who would have jobs if we simply had been able for the 
last 12 years to keep health care costs in line with inflation plus 
population growth. Many of you do. So all these things are related. When 
people say to me, well, you know, why don't you just reduce the deficit 
and forget about the rest of it? I'll tell you why. Because 5 years from 
now, no matter who does what with the deficit, it goes up again if you 
don't bring health costs in line with inflation plus population growth. 
They say, well, why don't you just not spend a nickel on anything? I'll 
tell you why. Because look at California if you want to see the 
consequences of 6 long years of cutting the defense budget and letting 
the people who won the cold war go out in the cold and giving no thought 
to what we're going to do with the scientific and technological base and 
the workers there and whether there is not some new partnership that 
would give them something to do.
    So we have to do things in order, and we have to begin by bringing 
the deficit down and putting our financial house in order. But we also 
have to think anew. All these partnerships you've got going in your 
businesses, if somebody came to work one day and said, ``OK, we're going 
to forget about these 12 things and just do this one,'' a lot of you 
would go broke if you did that. You do not have the luxury of ignoring 
some problems if you have the means at all to deal with them. And I 
would argue that we don't either. But there needs to be one overriding 
purpose for this country, and that is returning us to a path in which we 
can build a high-skill, high-wage, high-growth society in which people 
who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with decent work 
and an opportunity to raise a strong family in a safe neighborhood.
    Let me say very briefly that the essentials of the economic plan 
that the Congress is wrestling with--and I mean that literally, 
``wrestling with.'' I feel since I'm here in Chicago I have to say this. 
Chairman Rostenkowski and Senator Moynihan from New York are obviously 
the lead conferees on our budget, and they're working through some very 
difficult and complex issues today, and I compliment them for their 
enormous labors and for what they're doing. But the elements of the plan 
are clear: We want to bring the deficit down by $500 billion over 5 
years. We want to make at least as many cuts as we raise taxes, if not 
more. There are 200 cuts with more than $250 billion in them if the 
Congress will adopt them. We want to restore some fairness to hard-
working middle class families, and we want to reward work over welfare.
    For every $10 in the plan I presented to the Congress, and this is 
true in both the House and Senate version, $5 comes from spending cuts, 
$4 from new revenues from people in the upper 6 percent of earning 
brackets, $1 from the middle class. Families with incomes under $30,000 
are held harmless. The working poor for the first time are lifted out of 
poverty by not taxing them into poverty if they work hard. This is a 
very big deal in America. Eighteen percent of the people who work full-
time in this country are living below the Federal poverty line. It is 
hard to lecture people, to say, ``Well, don't be on welfare; go to 
work,'' if you don't reward work. That is something the Government can 
do that I think all Americans should support.
    Now, I want to say something else today, because we're celebrating 
partnerships here. The tax part of this program does not impose 70 
percent of its burden on people with incomes above $200,000 to soak the 
rich or promote class warfare. I want to reward success. The tax burden 
is the way it is because we seek to reverse what happened in the 1980's, 
where taxes went up on the middle class and down on the wealthiest 
Americans.

[[Page 1448]]

Payroll taxes went up, and the Government shoved more and more off on 
the State and local government, and almost all the revenues they adopted 
hit the middle class disproportionately. This has nothing to do with 
class warfare. It has to do with opportunity and fairness. And I think 
it will rebuild a sense of teamwork and a spirit of partnership and 
cooperation.
    I also want to point out that if we can continue to bring this 
deficit down, you will see the continuation of the last 5 months of a 
big drop in long-term interest rates, which is causing millions of 
people to refinance their home loans or their business loans or take out 
other forms of credit in ways that will save them far more money than 
they will pay in new revenues. If we can keep interest rates down for 
over a year at this level, it is estimated from a low side of $50 to a 
high side of $100 billion will be released to be reinvested back into 
this economy to jumpstart the economy again. I think it is terribly 
important.
    The second element of this plan, in addition to deficit reduction, 
is incentives for people and companies to invest more. That is, nothing 
would please me more than if people who would be pushed in the higher 
income brackets by this plan would lower their tax burden by turning 
around and reinvesting the money in creating jobs here at home. And this 
plan gives the opportunity to do that. We double the small business 
expensing provision. We have a new business capital gains that anybody 
that invests in a company capitalized at $50 million or less and holds 
the investment for 5 years or more will cut their tax burden in half. We 
extend the research and development tax credit. We do some other things 
to revitalize the home building industry and the real estate sectors of 
our economy. All these things will give opportunities for people who 
have funds to invest and to create jobs as they do. I think that is very 
important.
    I want to say I'm very grateful for the fact that at least 50 of the 
100 biggest companies in the country have endorsed this program, partly 
because the changes in the alternative minimum tax lets them invest in 
new plant and equipment, to mitigate the impact of the taxes, and to 
create more jobs and productivity. I'm grateful for the support we've 
received from the high-tech community, and I'm grateful that finally 
we're getting out the facts that 90 percent plus, that's right, over 90 
percent of the small businesses in America actually get a tax cut under 
this plan if they simply invest more money in their business because the 
expensing provision has been doubled, and their income taxes don't go 
up, something that you haven't been reading a lot about in the press. 
But it is true, and I am glad to see it coming out. And it's very 
important, because most of our jobs are created by smaller firms, and 
that needs to be emphasized.
    The third element of this plan is investments to empower people to 
compete and win. Every child born in this country should be able to grow 
up to be successful. But you and I know that we have a far higher 
percentage of people living in unhealthy, disadvantageous environments 
than most of our wealthy competitors. We have proof; we have evidence. 
No one disputes it that if you invest in child nutrition, immunization, 
and preschool education, and they're good programs, the programs pay for 
themselves many times over: The taxpayers win, productivity goes up, and 
you have people who can learn when they get into school. So yes, we do 
spend some more money on that. We also have a program of modest cost but 
enormous impact called Goals 2000 coming out of the Department of 
Education, designed to set national standards by which all schools and 
students can be evaluated. And that is important in a global economy. 
And we have, as has already been said by Senator Simon and others, a 
really ambitious and I think quite wonderful program to open the doors 
of college education to all Americans by lowering the costs of loans, 
making their terms of repayments better, and giving thousands of them 
the opportunity to pay back their college loans through service to their 
communities, rebuilding them. And I might say some of those young people 
in our experimental program for the summer have helped people to try to 
deal with the aftermath of this terrible flood in the Midwest. That is 
just one example of what we can do if we have the right kind of 
incentives.

[[Page 1449]]

    Finally, we very much want to create a program of training for 
people who don't get 4-year college degrees, that merge the partnership 
and efforts of the private sector, the education system, and the 
Government. Everybody in this country who doesn't go on to a 4-year 
college needs to finish high school and get at least 2 years of further 
training, either in a school, on the workplace, or in the service. 
Everybody. All the demographic figures are clear now from the '90 
census. All the people in this country who have high school plus 2 
years, if it's good, are highly likely to get jobs with growing incomes. 
Those who have less are highly likely to get jobs with shrinking 
incomes. You know, you don't have to be Einstein to figure out we should 
do what is likely to give people jobs with growing incomes and that, in 
the aggregate, it's better for you in the workplace and better for the 
country as a whole. So we're trying to do that.
    And lastly, let me say, we've got to provide markets for all these 
people's labor in products or services. We simply have to continue to 
expand the frontiers of the global economy. A wealthy country cannot 
grow richer unless there is a higher rate of global growth. We cannot do 
it by simply drawing within. And perhaps the most important thing that 
happened at the G-7 meeting in Tokyo was that the seven industrial 
powers agreed among themselves to a dramatic reduction, in many cases, 
to outright elimination of tariffs, that every analyst says will 
dramatically increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the United 
States of America between now and the end of the decade if we, the 
larger countries, can get the other countries to agree to it by the end 
of the year in a world trade agreement. No analyst has disputed this. It 
has the potential of being the most important thing we've done in a long 
time to revitalize manufacturing in America. And of course, when you 
rebuild manufacturing, you get more service jobs, you get a lot of other 
support jobs. It is very, very important.
    Let me also say that I think it's important that we not forget about 
the Americans who are working hard and are struggling along. I mentioned 
this earlier. The most revolutionary social aspect of this economic plan 
is that instead of spending a lot of money to hire people to work for 
the Government to go out and help people who are in trouble, we invest a 
lot of money in this program in lowering the taxes of people who work 40 
hours a week and are still in poverty. What better thing could we do to 
reward work and family than to be able to say for the first time that in 
this country if you work 40 hours a week and you've got a child in your 
house, you're going to be lifted out of poverty, not by something the 
Government does but by your own labor. We'll just change the tax system 
to take you out of poverty. It is a profoundly significant thing, and it 
should not be watered down in this conference. We ought to do enough to 
be able to say that to all Americans.
    Let me just say that the one thing that's happened in the last 4\1/
2\, 5 months is that interest rates have started coming down as it 
became serious that we were trying to bring the deficit down. And there 
has been a beginning of reinvestment. A lot of that is coming out of the 
private sector. Last year, in the last quarter, we had the biggest 
increase in productivity in 20 years in America, thanks to a lot of you 
in this room. Those two things together mean that in this economy we 
have seen in the first part of the year about 150,000 new private sector 
jobs a month being created--that is as compared with 20,000 a month in 
the previous 4 years--so that we are moving in the right direction. But 
that's all we're doing, is moving in the right direction. That is 
nowhere near enough, and there is still a great cloud of uncertainty out 
there.
    So I think today we need to have three challenges. One is, the 
Government needs to pass this budget and get on with the rest of the 
business. Hanging out there, debating it, dragging it out for weeks and 
weeks, will only make it worse. There comes a time when delay to get a 
slightly better decision is worse than action to get a pretty good 
decision. We have reached that time. We don't need to do that. We've got 
other things to do. And you need to know what the rules are going to be, 
what the deal is, and we need to go on with our lives.
    The second challenge is to you in business. If we can get the cost 
of capital low, if we are doing our part, then the savings must be

[[Page 1450]]

used to put more people first, to create jobs, to train employees, not 
just the executives but the workers as well, to have other companies in 
this country learn from those of you in this room that you can grow and 
prosper by treating workers like indispensable partners. Companies like 
Motorola outside Chicago, which Secretary Brown visited recently, and L. 
S. Electro Galvanizing in Cleveland, which Secretary Reich visited 
recently, and all the many that I have had the privilege to visit over 
the last several years can show that.
    And the challenge to labor is clearly the same thing. This is an 
opportunity we have to seize. There is no way we can ever see wages grow 
and jobs increase in this country again unless there is an emphasis on 
education and training, flexibility in the workplace, partnership and 
responsibility by everybody for improving quality. But if the labor 
people do it, then Government ought to do right by them and by business, 
and business should do right by their workers. There is no easy answer 
here, but we all know, I think, that if we treat each other better we're 
going to come out ahead, and that insofar as we drive up unemployment 
and run people off, we also diminish the number of customers with money 
in their pockets to make the American economy go. We are truly in this 
together.
    Now, let me just say one more word about this. I don't think the 
fight in Washington should be about Republicans and Democrats. I think 
most of the arguments we have to have are about issues that don't have 
an easy partisan tent. The world is a very different place than it was 
when most of the party lines were drawn 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. This 
really is about growth against gridlock, decision against delay, change 
against the status quo. And you have got to demand that we do something.
    I mean, you know, this gridlock thing is amazing. Let me just give 
you an example of how bad it gets sometimes with Congress. I had my 
nominee for Surgeon General up there in the Congress--Senator Braun was 
sitting with her; I appreciated that--a woman that grew up in a cotton 
field in Arkansas. Her brothers and sisters put her through medical 
school. And maybe there were people who don't agree with her and didn't 
want to vote for her, but through some parliamentary maneuver, they 
tried to put off the whole hearing. The country needs a Surgeon General. 
Thanks to Senator Kennedy, the chairman of the committee, they went back 
and had the hearing. He told them they were going to stay there 'til 
kingdom come, 'til they finished. But if somebody wants to vote against 
her, let them vote. But let's get on with it.
    Let me give you another example. There is now a filibuster in the 
Senate against the national service plan. We have worked our hearts out 
with the Republicans and the Democrats. We have lots of Republican 
cosponsors in the House and a few in the Senate. They just want to delay 
it. Why? Why shouldn't we send a signal to America's young people that 
we want you to work in your community to make it a better place? Why 
shouldn't we say we want to open the doors of college education to 
everybody? Look at the figures from the '90 census.
    Last week there was even a filibuster or a delay in the House 
against flood assistance to Illinois and to Iowa and to Kansas and South 
Dakota and North Dakota and Minnesota and Missouri. Why? Got me. There 
is ample precedent for emergency action here. We do not need to raise a 
tax to pay for flood relief; because interest rates have come down, the 
deficit is already going to be much lower this year than anybody thought 
it was. And here are these people out here up to their ears in tragedy, 
wondering when Congress is going to get around to passing the flood 
relief. There is a point at which we need to learn what we're talking to 
you about. We need to work together and make decisions.
    How many of you could stay in business if either management or labor 
said when you started a new path, ``Well, I think I'm going to call a 
filibuster and wait 3 or 4 weeks to make up my mind whether to do 
this?'' Your bills still come in. You still have to pay the payroll. 
Let's vote. I don't have to win them all, but let's make decisions. This 
institutionalized delay and gridlock is bad for America.
    In just a couple of weeks----

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    Q. How can you talk about a Democratically controlled Congress? The 
Democrats have controlled Congress--talk about gridlock. Why don't you 
take leadership?
    The President. Now, wait a minute. Whoa!
    Q. You're the one that talks about----
    The President. Do you want me to answer the question?
    Q. Yes. You're the one----
    The President. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Most people, sir--no, 
wait a minute. Are you going to let me answer the question?
    Q. ----Congress and you won't----
    Audience members. Quiet!
    The President. Are you going to let me answer the question? This is 
not your meeting, sir. And most people have better manners than to 
interrupt somebody giving a speech. I might say that's another thing 
that's wrong with this country, there's not enough civility in how we 
treat one another.
    But the answer to your question, which is good Civics 101, is that 
the Democrats do not control the Congress when 41 Republicans want to 
vote to keep anything from being voted on in the Senate. That is the 
answer. They do not. The filibuster rule means you have to have 60 votes 
to bring anything to a vote except for this budget. Everything else 
requires 60 votes. But it's not a party deal, it's a question of whether 
we should make decisions. I say, if they want to vote against me, fine; 
let's make a decision and go on to something else. Let's just move. I 
think that's the issue.
    Let me just say one last thing. I believe that this works. I came 
here basically to highlight what you're doing and to support it and to 
ask you to tell me what I can do to help it be better at the national 
level. But in the end, if this kind of attitude that you are here to 
celebrate, this whole new idea of a partnership for productivity and 
leaving behind all the sort of labeling that has shackled us for too 
long, if this doesn't take over the private sector, nothing the 
President can do can revitalize America. You have to carry it. And I 
believe you will.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 1:15 p.m. at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel.