[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 29 (Monday, July 25, 1994)]
[Pages 1498-1504]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Council of La Raza in Miami

July 18, 1994

    Thank you so much, Secretary Cisneros, for that stirring set of 
remarks, for your kind and generous introduction, but more importantly, 
for your creative, vigorous, and effective leadership in the Department 
of Housing and Urban Development, a Department that is now known as a 
source of innovation, well run, efficiently run, but also a place where 
values count, where ideas count, on the cutting edge of change. Henry 
Cisneros, whether he is trying to integrate a housing development in 
Vidor, Texas, or trying to give safety and security back to the children 
in the public housing in Chicago or donning a hard hat to try to take 
some buildings down and make public housing more humane all across the 
country, he's the model of what we all ought to be in public service 
today. Let me also say, only half jokingly, he also has just 
demonstrated Clinton's third law of politics, which is whenever possible 
be introduced by someone you've appointed to high office; they will brag 
on you every time. [Laughter]
    To President Raul Yzaguirre--we were just reminiscing that he has 
been a leader of La Raza now for 20 years. I'm very glad you don't have 
term limits. [Laughter] He's been a good thing for your organization. To 
your board chair, Audrey Alvarado; to all the Members of Congress who 
are here, Congressman Pastor and Congressman Esteban Torres, who came 
from Washington with me and represents California and all the Members of 
the Florida delegation who are here, Representatives Meek and Brown and 
Deutsch, Diaz-Balart, and Shaw; and to my good friend Senator Bob Graham 
and Lt. Governor MacKay--and I think Governor Chiles is here; I know he 
was here: I am delighted to be here in Florida and most especially with 
La Raza.
    I want to say that when Henry and I were discussing what I should 
say today, he said I should say--let's see if I do it--Si, se puede, 
Yes, we can. That has been the model of my Presidency, and in some ways 
it was the model I was raised with by my wonderful mother who never 
spoke a word of Spanish but understood that message. I want to 
especially recognize, too, the honored guests you have here for Seniors 
Day. They know the meaning of those words, and they have done so much 
for us.
    As we gather here today, looking into a future that will begin a new 
century and a new millennium, I think it is important that we view all 
the specifics that we discussed, those that you have already discussed 
and the things I am about to say, in the larger context of the 
challenges of this time. I asked the American people for this office 
because I believed that we had to do much more to restore our economy, 
to restore the American dream, to help to create a world of peace and 
prosperity in which Americans could live up to their full potential, 
because I believed that we could not do that unless we made a great 
strength of our diversity, unless we were a country coming together, not 
coming apart, and because I believed we could not

[[Page 1499]]

do that unless the Government of the United States worked for ordinary 
citizens again.
    The future of the 21st century, the America that I want to see us 
build together, will be an America where Hispanic leadership anchors its 
place in boardrooms, schoolrooms, and all the halls of power, in which 
Hispanic-Americans will be sought out as leaders among opinion shapers 
and policymakers. In the America that's not just around the corner, in 
all our futures, Hispanics running for mayor, Governor, Congress, and 
yes, for President won't be running against the tide but with it. They 
will be leading the rebuilding of America and a renaissance of 
community, family, and work from the grassroots up.
    Of course, much of this is happening already. More than 5,000 
Hispanics hold elective office in America today, a world away from the 
numbers of a generation ago. The Hispanic Congressional Caucus has grown 
to 18 members and will surely grow more.
    Up and down the Americas, as we nurture democracy and expand trade, 
Hispanics are the bridges between our different countries and our 
cultures, bridges that will lead us to tomorrow.
    There is no doubt that in the unity of Hispanic-Americans there is 
great strength and that in the diversity of America there is great 
strength if we will but develop it and nourish it.
    In the last 18 months since I took office, we have followed that 
course, a course set in a long campaign and before that in a long public 
life, a course of change that you deserved. One of the things I have 
tried to do, and Secretary Cisneros referred to that, is to try to make 
this administration look more like America.
    Henry Cisneros and Federico Pena have become household names. But 
there are 288 other Hispanic-American appointees, 2.5 times as many as 
in the previous administration, many at the senior level. Eleven percent 
of the judicial appointments are Latinos, compared to just two 
appointments in each of the last two administrations. They are people 
who may or may not be well known, but they are making a difference every 
day, people like Aida Alvarez and Nelson Diaz at HUD; Norma Cantu and 
Mario Moreno at Education; Fernando Torres-Gil at HHS and Jack Otero and 
Maria Echaveste at Labor; Joe Valasquez, Suzanna Valdez, Carolyn Curiel, 
and many others in the White House. I have recently nominated Gill 
Casellas to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We've been 
joined by Polly Baca as Director of Consumer Affairs at the Department 
of Health and Human Services and by General Ed Baca as head of the 
National Guard, the first Hispanic ever to head the National Guard in 
the history of the United States.
    If you ask me do we need to do more and better, I would say yes. But 
we are doing better than people have done before. You just keep urging 
and working, and we'll keep doing better, broadening the base of 
America's Government.
    The whole purpose and strategy of everything that I have tried to do 
as your President is to make the American dream a real possibility for 
all of our citizens in a dramatic, even breathtakingly, changing world.
    The first thing we had to do was to get our economic house in order, 
to end the drift of the economy. Last year, Congress voted by the 
narrowest of margins for the economic plan that I proposed that included 
$255 billion in spending cuts, tax breaks for 15 million working 
American families, making 90 percent of our small businesses eligible 
for tax reductions, increasing income taxes on the wealthiest 1.5 
percent of our people.
    When that budget, combined with this budget, which eliminates over 
100 Government programs, cuts 200 others, and reduces the Federal work 
force by over a quarter of a million, giving us the smallest Federal 
Government in 1999 that we've had since Kennedy was President, when 
these two budgets are put together, we will have reduced the Federal 
deficit for 3 years in a row for the first time since Harry Truman was 
President of the United States.
    The Federal debt we will pass along to our children and 
grandchildren will be $700 billion less than it was estimated to be when 
I took office as President. We're also trying to grow this economy 
through expanding exports, through trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, 
bringing down foreign barriers to our products and services, eliminating 
our

[[Page 1500]]

own barriers to the exports of a lot of our high-tech products.
    Already because of NAFTA, we're exporting autos to Mexico at more 
than 5 times the rate of a year ago. And overall exports to Mexico are 
growing faster than to any other country with which we trade. Mexico's 
exports to the United States are also up, too. Both of us are winning, 
because we did the right thing on NAFTA last year.
    And I have just come from a meeting of distinguished citizens of 
south Florida who are working to make the summit of the Americas, near 
the end of this year, a success. You know, this meeting that we're going 
to have will include the Democratic leaders of this entire hemisphere, 
the Caribbean and Central and South America as well as in North America. 
We are going to talk about what we can do to strengthen democracy, what 
we can do to continue to integrate all of the Americas economically, and 
what we are going to do to help to build a system of sustainable 
development so that we can preserve our precious natural resources and 
grow our economies at the same times. It will be an historic meeting, 
and we are having it right here in Miami.
    I told the folks who were there that I had the opportunity last 
night to talk to the coach of the Brazilian soccer team and the head of 
the Brazilian Federation of Soccer, once again reminding me of some of 
the things we have to do as Americans, because he spoke very good 
English, and I didn't speak his language. But he said an interesting 
thing to me. He said, ``You know, when we all came here we wondered 
about this World Cup because we knew soccer was not your game. And yet, 
we've had wonderful attendance. We've had an open door to all of our 
people coming from other countries to see your games. The American 
people have made this the best World Cup ever.'' Well, it put me to 
thinking, soccer may not be our game, but democracy is; enterprise is; 
diversity as a strength is. We can make the summit of the Americas a 
truly historic event for all of you in this room and all you represent. 
Twenty years from now we'll look back on what is happening in Miami at 
the end of this year as one of the most important events, paving the way 
to the right kind of future in the 21st century.
    Let me say this strategy is working, bringing the deficit down, 
investing more in education and training, investing more in new 
technologies, opening new trade opportunities, it's working. In the last 
18 months, our economy has generated more than 3.8 million jobs, the 
unemployment rate has dropped 1.7 percent. Last year we had the largest 
number of new businesses started in the United States than any year 
since the end of World War II. We are going in the right direction.
    But we know we need to do more. We know we have to give our citizens 
the confidence they need to grow. We know that among Latinos there has 
been stronger support for the idea of education and hard work through 
education as the way out of poverty and the way to the American dream 
than perhaps any other community in the United States. But we also know 
that we have not yet provided our people with the kind of lifetime 
learning opportunities that we now know are necessary to succeed and win 
in the global economy. The average person, after all, will change jobs 
seven times in a lifetime. So we need a world-class system that starts 
from the day someone enrolls in kindergarten or pre-school to the day 
they finish high school, to the day they go to college or go into a job-
training program or go into work for the first time, until the day they 
retire. And we are working on that.
    This year the Congress has provided, largely on a completely 
bipartisan basis, perhaps the most important education reforms we have 
had in a generation, a total reform of the Head Start system serving 
more children at a younger age; expansion of childhood immunization; the 
Goals 2000 bill, which sets international educational goals for all of 
our schools and encourages grassroots reforms to meet them; the school-
to-work transition bill, which trains young people who don't go on to 
college but who do need at least 2 years of further training to get good 
jobs with a growing income. We must do that for every one of our 
noncollege-bound young people. And we are now considering a way to 
change the unemployment system into a reemployment system so that when 
people

[[Page 1501]]

lose their jobs they can immediately begin to retrain for the jobs of 
tomorrow.
    Now, when you put all that with what the Congress did last year in 
the economic program, which was to reform the college loans so that--
listen to this, we made 20 million Americans eligible for lower interest 
rates, better repayment on their college loans, so that no one should 
ever not go to college again because of the cost of a college education. 
We are on the right track to the future.
    We are trying to do things that honor your values: opportunity, 
responsibility, community, and the soul of the Hispanic culture, our 
families. Last year we enacted the Family Medical Leave Law, and we cut 
taxes on 15 million working families to encourage people to stay in the 
work force, not to slip back into welfare. We established a White House 
commission on Hispanic educational excellence, chaired by Raul. And I am 
confident that he will find even more ways for us to help the people who 
need help.
    Our program of national service, AmeriCorps, has benefited from the 
guidance of La Raza. This year we will have 20,000 young Americans all 
across the country working in their communities to deal with problems 
and earning money to continue their education. Year after next we can 
have 100,000 young Americans rebuilding America from the grassroots up. 
In Texas alone, the community service program helped to immunize 100,000 
extra children in the first year it was in place.
    To give you an idea of the dimensions of what national service can 
do for America, in your communities, in the largest year of 
participation of the Peace Corps, the largest number we ever had 
participating was 16,000. We'll have 20,000 this year in national 
service, 100,000 the year after next. It can help to rebuild America. 
And the spirit of La Raza should be there in project after project after 
project after project.
    There are two issues I want to speak with you about in closing 
today, without which we cannot make America what it ought to be. The 
first is crime. It is tearing our country apart, costing us too much in 
money and in humanity. And we have to take control of our streets and 
our neighborhoods again. Right now we are very close to winning passage 
of an historic crime bill that would put 100,000 more police officers on 
the street, a 20 percent increase in the number of police officers on 
the street. It would ban assault weapons that too often make gangs 
better armed than the police who are supposed to be protecting the 
American people. And I might add, for those of you who come from rural 
sporting constituencies like mine, it would identify over 600 sporting 
and hunting weapons that could not be banned or restricted in any way. 
It is a law enforcement measure.
    It would provide tougher penalties for repeat offenders, more money 
for local governments to build jail cells but, for the first time ever, 
$8 billion in prevention, to give our young people something to say yes 
to as well as something to say no to.
    But we've been slowed down in the last few weeks, and we need to 
speed up to pass the crime bill. If anybody doubts why we need it, 
notice your morning papers. Yesterday, the Department of Justice 
released a study that showed that in America children between the ages 
of 12 and 17 are 5 times more likely to be beaten, raped, and robbed 
than adults in America. Children are the new victims of crime in 
America. Our children are the most common victims. And the trends are 
not good because our children are also more and more likely to be the 
most common perpetrators. Violent crimes committed against children are 
up 23 percent since 1987, even in many cities where the overall crime 
rate is going down. We are allowing our children to be terrorized, a 
generation of children to be lost in place after place in America, and 
we must stop it.
    And this problem is infecting people without regard to their race. 
I'll never forget meeting the parents of Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped 
from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, and subsequently killed. And 
then there was the letter I got in late April or early May, which a lot 
of you remember, from 9-year-old James Darby of New Orleans. He wrote me 
this letter and pleaded with me to do something about the crime problem. 
He said, ``I think somebody might kill me, and I'm asking you nicely to 
do something about it.'' Nine days later he was

[[Page 1502]]

gunned down--9 years old, writing the President, pleading for help. Then 
yesterday we get the statistical horror that our children are 5 times 
more likely to be victimized than the rest of us.
    The names of Polly Klaas and James Darby and all the others we're 
going to lose if we don't act--it's time, it's time to put all of our 
differences aside, to work out the problems we have to work out and pass 
that crime bill. Every day, every week, every month that goes by is 
another period of time when the police aren't on the street, when the 
assault weapons ban is not in place, when the tougher penalties on 
repeat offenders are not in place, when we don't have the prevention 
programs on the streets in every neighborhood in the United States. This 
is the best and biggest and most significant fight on crime in the 
history of the United States, and we ought to act on it and do it now.
    The other problem I need your help on and I have to thank you for is 
health care. I want to thank first La Raza for issuing its statement in 
favor of universal coverage and shared responsibility. But I also want 
to talk frankly about this. You know, for 60 years our country has tried 
under Presidents of both parties to reform our health care system, to 
provide health security for all Americans. And we have never been able 
to do it.
    There are reasons for that. But first, let me ask you to look at the 
system we have now. What is good about it? The doctors, the nurses, the 
technology, the medical research: If you can get it, it is the finest in 
the world. And there are a lot of selfless people. I have been to a 
public health clinic here in Miami that I will never forget, treating 
people without regard to their means and giving the best health care 
they possibly could.
    But if you look at our system and compare it to others and if you 
want America to compete and win in the global economy, we must be 
willing to rigorously compare ourselves to others, both our strengths 
and our weaknesses. Here are the facts: We spend a bigger percentage of 
our income, 14.5 percent, on health care, than any other country. Nobody 
is over 10. Canada spends 10 percent; Germany and Japan spend about 8.5 
percent. But we are the only nation that simply cannot figure out how to 
cover everybody; in fact, we're going in reverse. Ten years ago, 88 
percent of our people were covered with health insurance or covered by 
Government programs. Today we're back to 83 and dropping.
    States have struggled with reforms. Forty States have enacted 
various kinds of insurance reforms. Of the States which have acted, 30 
of those States have still had an increase in the number of people 
without insurance. You say, ``Well, 83 percent, that means only one in 
six Americans don't have health insurance. That's not too bad. Even 
though nobody else would tolerate it, it's not too bad.'' But it is bad. 
Why? Because nearly everybody can lose your health insurance. Who can't 
lose their insurance? If you're rich, you can always buy it. If you're 
poor, the Government will give it to you. If you're in jail, you'll get 
it. If you work for the Government, you'll get it. Anybody else can lose 
it, even if you've got it. And we simply have to find a way to deal with 
this.
    The second big problem we have is--I saw all of you nodding your 
heads when I was talking about education and training out there, 
identifying with what I said. Most Americans without regard to their 
party would say the United States today should be spending more 
investing in our future, more on education and training, more on 
airports, more on roads, more on technology, more to build a powerful 
economy. You ought to look at your Federal Government budget.
    Now, I am proud of the fact that we're eliminating 100 programs and 
cutting over 200 others. Proud of the fact that I gave the Congress the 
first budget in 25 years, if it passes this way, that will actually 
reduce domestic spending, excluding health care and the other things 
we've called entitlements. But if you look at what we're doing, we are 
cutting defense, and I don't believe we can cut it much more. We are 
right at the edge, below which we shouldn't go. We've cut it 
dramatically.
    We're holding all other domestic spending constant, and health care 
is exploding. We're exploding health care costs at 2 and 3 times the 
rate of inflation, paying more for the same health care. You're going to 
be listening to Presidential campaigns from now till king- 

[[Page 1503]]

dom come if we don't do something about health care where the people 
running will be standing up and telling you something that's not so 
because they won't be able to spend a nickel to see the cow jump over 
the Moon. They will have to spend all the money, pay more every year for 
the same health care.
    Small businesses in America are paying 30 percent more on average 
than big business and Government. And more and more people are going 
without health care coverage. Now, this is the biggest issue, a bigger 
issue to Hispanic-Americans than any other group. Why? Because more 
working Hispanics are uninsured than any other group of Americans. More 
than 32 percent of the Hispanic population is uninsured, compared to 13 
percent for Anglo-Americans and 20 percent for African-Americans.
    Why is that? Is that because more of you are on welfare? No. If you 
were on welfare you'd have health insurance. It's because you are 
working for small business people or part-time for jobs that do not have 
health benefits, often for employers that honestly cannot afford health 
benefits in the current environment.
    Now, one of the real problems we have with this debate is that the 
people who want to stop us from fixing it say they're sticking up for 
small business. They say that small business can't afford one percent of 
payroll or 2 percent of payroll to provide for health care. The problem 
is that most small businesses today are trying to provide health care, 
and they're paying too much for two reasons: number one, because they're 
having to carry the burden for those who won't do anything for their 
employees and, number two, because they're small, they can't get the 
same good rates that people who work for Government and big business 
can. And it's not right.
    We have always believed that the States were the laboratories of 
democracy. I'm supporting the State of Florida now in a very innovative 
thing they want to do with health care. But we do have one State, 
Hawaii, who 20 years ago decided that there ought to be shared 
responsibility, a 50-50 deal, employers pay half of health insurance and 
employees pay half of it and everybody gets covered. They have about 98 
percent coverage. Their infant mortality rate has dropped by 50 percent. 
Their average longevity is more than the national average.
    You say, ``Well, Hawaii is healthy, happy place. We all go there to 
play golf, or whatever.'' The truth is that 20 percent of their health 
burden are poor native islanders. And the most important thing is that 
small business premiums there are 30 percent below the national average. 
Why? Because nobody is refusing to do their part and because the little 
guys can join together in big pools and get the same costs that bigger 
employers can.
    My fellow Americans, the Hispanic community has always stood for 
work over welfare, for holding families together against all the odds, 
and for the notion that the community was important, that we all became 
more by working together and being loyal to one another than we could 
just pursuing our individual destinies. And yet we are living in a 
country that is the only advanced country in the world that cannot 
figure out how to cover all of its people. We are punishing the small 
businesses who try to do the right thing. We are spending 40 percent 
more of our income than anybody else. We are losing ground on coverage 
every day. And a lot of people say that what we ought to do is put a 
Band-Aid on the present system.
    I say to you, this is one issue where the political rhetoric is 
divorced from the reality. The right thing to do for small business that 
will generate more jobs is to ask everybody to be responsible, give 
small business a break, give small business the voluntary opportunity to 
join a buying cooperative so they can get better rates, but cover 
everybody. Cover everybody.
    We have experience. We know what works and what doesn't. This is a 
very tough fight because we are spending so much of our money on health 
care on things that relate to the financing of health care, not keeping 
people healthy or treating them when they're sick. And a lot of people 
don't want to change the status quo. But if you look at the trends, it 
is truly frightening. Thirty-two percent of Hispanic-Americans, working 
people--of all the people in America without health insurance today, 85 
percent of them get up every day and work for a living. And if they 
would quit and go on welfare, we'd give them good health care.

[[Page 1504]]

    Is that the message we want to send to our people? Is that the 
message we want to send to our children? Do you want health care for 
sure? Go on welfare, go to jail, get elected to Congress, or get rich. 
[Laughter] I'm not criticizing the Congress; be a Federal employee, be 
the President. Be President. I've got it, and I'm not going to lose it. 
And it's not right. And we know what to do. Do we have the will, do we 
have the courage, do we have the vision to do it?
    I ask you this because it isn't just that one in six Americans don't 
have health insurance; it isn't just that one in three Hispanics don't 
have health insurance; it's that the two and three who do have it could 
lose it. Eighty-one million of us live in families like Henry Cisneros' 
family, where his young son, who means more to him than anything in the 
world, has fought a heroic battle against a tragic health problem. And 
he works for us, so he's got health insurance. What if Henry Cisneros 
were a traveling salesman? What in God's name would have happened to his 
son?
    There are 81 million of us that live in these families. We owe it to 
them to be able to work, to grow, to flourish, to take care of their 
children. Or if their wives get premature breast cancer or a man has a 
heart attack at 40, we cannot shut them down. And unless you cover 
everybody, if you try to fix their problem, the only thing you're going 
to do is raise everybody else's insurance and have more middle class 
people losing their insurance. We know what to do. Do we have the 
courage to do it?
    La Raza is here after 26 years because you kept pushing people to 
change, because you did not deny the existence of real problems but 
instead embraced the exhilaration of dealing with them. Now, I know a 
lot of the things I do as President aren't always popular, but I'll tell 
you what, I show up for work every day and I ask people to face real 
problems. This is a real problem. Crime is a real problem. Welfare is a 
real problem. Continuing to make this economy go forward is a real 
problem. They are also enormous opportunities. This is the greatest 
country in human history. I believe we can deal with this if you'll give 
us the energy and support we need to do it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 1:35 p.m. at the Miami Beach Convention 
Center.