[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 31 (Monday, August 8, 1994)]
[Pages 1628-1633]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks on the Anniversary of the Passage of the Economic Program
August 5, 1994
Well, thank you all. We've established one thing beyond doubt. We
all have enough sense to come in out of the rain. [Laughter]
Thank you, Mr. Quimby, and thank all of you. We've had
representatives of four fine companies speak here today: the head of one
of our largest corporations; the head of a medium-sized high-tech
company, growing and growing into the world economy; the head of a small
company that's doubled the number of--or now a man that's moved from a
small job to a large job in a small company that's growing very rapidly;
and a new employee. The Vice President and I wanted these folks here for
this announcement today because they represent what our efforts are all
about.
I said the other night in my press conference that there are a lot
of lobby groups in Washington, but I wanted the White House to be known
as the ``home office of the `American association of ordinary citi-
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zens.''' And what I mean by that is that in this time of profound
change, what we need to be doing is figuring out how we can make the
changes necessary together to enable all of our people to live up to
their potential, to fulfill their dreams, to move into the next century
with the American dream alive in every family and with American
leadership secure. And when I sought this job, I was convinced that
would require some changes in my political party, some change in the
other political party, and some changes in the way we do our work here
in Washington.
If you listen to the four stories here, that's really what's behind
all these arcane arguments and all the political rhetoric over economic
policy: the simple question of whether people will be able to pursue
their destinies and their dreams and live up to the fullest of their
abilities. I could never hope to say it any better than these four
people did, and I think we should give them all another round of
applause. [Applause]
Today, we celebrate because this morning, as the chart to my left
shows, the Labor Department reported that since our administration came
into office, our economy has produced more than 4 million new jobs,
almost all of them in the private sector. Now, as we know, when I ran
for office, I said I thought we could produce 8 million new jobs in 4
years and that we would do 4 by the end of '94. So we're 6 months ahead
of schedule.
I do want to correct one thing. You know, I get criticized sometimes
for my attention to detail, but I want to show you this. Where is it? I
asked for this pen this morning when I looked at this chart because when
I looked at the numbers, there are actually not 4 million new jobs but
4.1 million new jobs. And now that we're out of the rain, I'm going to
make a correction on it.
Manufacturing jobs have been increasing in this country for 7 months
in a row now for the first time in 10 years. All the jobs created last
month, 100 percent of them, were in the private sector, not in
government. Companies like Kenlee Precision have added those second and
third shifts, jobs that made it possible for people like Charles Quimby
to get ahead. Companies like Ellicott Machine have been able to hire new
workers like Frankie McLaurin. Executives like Bob Eaton and Carol Bartz
are making a good beginning in this remarkable partnership we have to
renew America. And they described to you, perhaps better than I could,
what the role of the National Government is in their agenda for the
future, what we should be doing and what we should not be doing.
None of this has been easy. Indeed, I have been mystified since I
got here about why some of these things are as hard as they are and why
they take as long as they do. One of the problems is that in this town,
sometimes words replace reality. In the computer business and in high
technology, virtual reality is a very good thing. It enables you to
replicate situations and to avoid future problems. In Washington, I'm
not sure we have virtual reality; I think what we have up here is
virtual unreality, which is a bad thing because it enables you to almost
dehumanize problems and turn them into words and rhetoric and labels.
And we have all these word battles up here that don't seem to make any
sense to ordinary people.
Once in a while I watch the evening news, and I'm usually working
when it's on--once in a while I watch it, and I see the way we're
presented, and I look at that and I say, well, heck, if I was still back
home I wouldn't be for that guy either. [Laughter] Just because of the
way it all plays out. You know, it's so--it's kind of unreal. And what
we've got to do is find ways to bring reality, your reality, the way you
look at the world, the way you live with the world every day, into the
decisionmaking of this town.
And that's what we did when we passed that economic plan. Bob Eaton
had it right. He said, well, he wouldn't have done it in the same way we
did, but he was glad we got the job done. Well, that's the way I feel
about his cars. I don't have any idea if I'd make the same decisions he
makes on everything, but they make awful good cars and I'm glad they got
the job done. In the end, that's the way we should judge ourselves.
And we did the best we could with that economic program, considering
the fact that at the moment of voting we had no help from the other
side. They said the sky would fall. One of them, and I quote, said,
``Taxes will
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go up. The economy will sputter along. The deficit will reach another
record high. It's a recipe for disaster.'' That was wrong. That was
wrong.
What did we do? We did have a tax increase on the wealthiest
Americans, but it's still--the rates are well below where they were in
1980. And all the money went to pay down the deficit and to finance a
tax break for 15 million working families who were just above the
poverty line, and we didn't want them to go back to welfare. We wanted
to encourage people with low wages to keep working and to keep raising
their kids and to stick by the American dream. There were too many
people who were giving up work for welfare, and we wanted it to be the
reverse. So I plead guilty to that.
We also cut $255 billion in spending, and we passed a tough budget
that helped to drive those interest rates down, get this economy going
again. This year, we're about to pass another tough budget that
eliminates 100 Government programs outright, contains the first
reduction in domestic discretionary spending in 25 years--outright
reduction--and continues to drive that deficit down while increasing the
money we're spending to empower people to succeed in the global economy:
more for education and training, more for Head Start for little kids,
the establishment of a lifetime learning system, for world-class
standards in our public schools, more apprenticeships for young people
who get out of high school and don't want to go to college. And our
economic program made it possible for 20 million Americans to refinance
their college loans at lower interest rates and better repayment terms.
That is the direction in which we ought to be going.
And finally, as you heard Carol and Bob talking about, we're trying
to expand the barriers of trade, or tear down the barriers and expand
the frontiers. Frankie said that Ellicott was doing well largely because
of NAFTA. They also said--a different group said that the sky would fall
if we did that. But there we had a bipartisan majority fighting for
change. We passed it. Our car sales in Mexico are growing 5 times as
fast as they did before NAFTA was passed. Mexico is now our fastest
growing trading partner. Even though their economy is in a down period,
we're still having explosive growth. Think what it will be like when
they start to grow again. This is very important.
We're trying to sell airplanes all around the world. We just
announced a new shipbuilding initiative. The Trade Ambassador, Mr.
Kantor, has resolved agricultural disputes with Canada. We're selling
rice to Japan for the first time. We are moving in to the global
economy, and we are working on these things. And I don't know that these
things fall very neatly into the kind of words people throw at each
other here in this town. Is it liberal or conservative, Republican or
Democrat? I don't know, and I don't care. I just want people to be able
to work and to do well and to have this economy grow.
And I know to do that--when we have the deficit coming down for 3
years in a row for the first time since Truman was President, when we're
moving toward the smallest Federal Government that we've had since
Kennedy was President, and when the economy is growing this rapidly--
last year we had more businesses formed than in any year since World War
II--we're not doing bad. We've got to get rid of the rhetoric and go
back to reality.
And I would say this: The future looks good. Fortune Magazine
predicts for the first time in 10 years, the economy in every State in
America will grow next year. And that is very good. Most businesses
expect to grow next year and to expand. And consumer confidence is high.
But we have to continue to face the tough problems up here. And one
of the things that I hope very much will happen is that the experience
that we had working through these economic problems and the results that
have been achieved when you take on a problem, risks of unpopularity in
the short run, even if you win by the narrowest of margins, if you
actually address a problem, you get results. That is very good because
that proves that Washington is not all that unreal after all, that there
really is some connection to our lives up here and the way you live
where you are. Because if you ignore the problems in these four
companies, 10 years from now there won't be anybody from your companies
to show up here and talk at the White House.
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In the end, you have to face the challenges before you. We are now
seeing that again. We have some challenges ahead of us. The Congress
must, must approve the worldwide GATT trade agreement that we
negotiated, that we got agreement on, but the Congress has to enact it.
It will mean a tax cut in the form of lower tariffs and lower costs for
Americans and people all across the world of--listen to this--$744
billion over the next 10 years. It will create hundreds of thousands of
high-paying American jobs. We have got to finish the job on the trade
issue. The next step is GATT.
Before I close, I want to mention two other issues, but it's the
same point, problems you can't run away from. We must address the health
care situation this year, not just for the people who don't have health
insurance but for the people who do but who pay too much for it and who
could lose it, not just for the companies who don't provide health care
but for the companies who do and pay too much for it.
Why have the Big Three automakers supported us in health reform all
along? Because one of the reasons we lost jobs and market share in the
automobile industry is that they were paying too much for health care.
And one of the reasons they were paying too much for health care is they
were paying for all the people in this country who don't cover
themselves and who don't do their own part.
Now, here are some basic facts that nobody can ignore. We can all
disagree on the solution; nobody can ignore these facts. Of all the
countries in the world, we spend more than anybody else on health care
by a long ways, but we're the only major country that doesn't cover
everybody with health insurance. Of all the countries in the world with
which we compete, we are the only one going in the wrong direction.
Today there are 5 million Americans, 85 percent of them working people
and their kids, who are in this country today who do not have health
insurance, who had it 5 years ago. So we're going in the wrong
direction.
We have problems here with people who have health insurance but
could lose it if they change jobs, somebody in their family gets sick,
they have a preexisting condition, or the cost of the policy goes
through the roof.
Yesterday I gave awards to four young Americans who have done heroic
things and important community service. The United States has been doing
this through the Justice Department for the last 44 years. One of these
young Americans was the daughter of a farmer, who happens to be a
Republican, in the panhandle of Oklahoma. She was injured and paralyzed
from here down in a car wreck in 1990. This girl, a beautiful girl,
could have given up on life, but instead she decided she would devote
herself to try and encourage other young people not to drink and drive
and not to ride with people who drink and drive and always put their
seatbelts on in a car. She was going to try to help other people avoid
what had happened to her. And her daddy is just a hard-working farmer.
She's got a sister who is a lovely girl; she's got a wonderful mother.
They were paying over $3,000 a year for a limited health insurance
policy with very high deductibles. All of her costs were a couple of
years ago, attendant on her wreck. This is 4 years later; they were just
notified that their insurance premiums were going from $3,100 a year to
$9,300 a year. And this farmer is going to have to drop his insurance.
Now, with these two wonderful kids, he's got to figure out how
they're going to college, what they're going to do, living out there in
a little town in western Oklahoma. And like he told me, he said, ``You
know, this is not a political deal.'' He said, ``I'm a Republican; I'm a
conservative. I don't want the Government to do anything for me, but we
need some help here. There's something wrong if I can't take care of my
family, hard as I'm working.''
So again, I say to the Members of Congress on this, let's just do
something about this. Most small businesses in America are struggling to
provide health care, and they're paying too much for it, because they
can't get the same rates that big business and Government gets. Some big
businesses, like Chrysler, are paying too much for it because when
people who don't have health insurance get sick, they still get care.
They go to the emergency room, and then their costs are passed along to
everybody else in higher hospital bills and higher insurance premiums.
[[Page 1632]]
We know that something works. We know what they do in Hawaii works.
It's the only State where employers and employees are required to split
the difference and cover health insurance. And we know that even though
most everything else in Hawaii is more expensive than it is on the
mainland because it's way out there in the Pacific, health insurance
costs for small business are 30 percent lower there than the national
average. Why? Because everybody has to pay something, but you're only
paying for yourself, you're not paying for anybody else, number one, and
number two, because small and medium-sized companies get to band
together in big buying groups so they can buy insurance with the same
competitive power as Chrysler and the Federal Government. So we know
that works.
So I just think I would say again, all I ask of any of you is to ask
the Members of Congress to put aside partisanship, rhetoric, and this
sort of word-throwing, and let's just think about the people of America,
just like we do here, 4.1 Americans who have jobs, all different races,
all different religions, all different political groups. All I know is,
we're better off that they're in that line. And we'd be better off if we
solved the health care problem, and we're going to pay a terrible price
if we don't.
One last issue I want to mention: I went to the Justice Department
last week for what was a great celebration. We had hundreds of police
officers there to celebrate the fact that after 6 years of bickering,
the House and the Senate had both passed crime bills and had agreed on a
common bill through their conference committees to send back so that
each one of them could pass identical bills, so that I could sign a
crime bill into law that would give us 100,000 police officers on the
street--that's a 20 percent increase; that would ban 19 kinds of assault
weapons and protect 650 hunting and sporting weapons, to make sure that
this was not a gun control issue, this was an assault weapons issue;
that would ban handgun ownership by minors; provide for safe schools;
provide for ``three strikes and you're out,'' tough penalties, more
prison cells, and billions of dollars for prevention programs to give
children something to say yes to as well as something to say no to, the
biggest, toughest, smartest crime bill this country's every passed.
Unbelievably, after 8 days nothing has happened. The bills are
there. We need it. The American people know how bad we need it. The
Democratic mayors and the Republican mayors have endorsed it. The
Democratic Governors and the Republican Governors have endorsed it.
Every police organization in the country, the attorney generals, the
local prosecutors out there in the country where people know that crime
strikes people without regard to race or political party, everybody is
for this crime bill. But here the crime bill is, stuck in a web spun by
a powerful special interest.
You see, before a bill can come to vote in the House of
Representatives, it has to be voted out of the Rules Committee. And then
the House has to vote first on whether the bill's going to actually be
brought to a vote, not on the bill but whether it's going to be brought
to a vote. It's a procedure.
The National Rifle Association is trying to block the vote on the
rule because they are against the assault weapons ban, because they know
that a majority of the House and the Senate will vote for this bill if
it gets to a vote. So they are trying to block the vote on the rule,
hoping that people can hide and say, ``Well, I didn't really vote
against the bill, but there was something about the way it was coming up
I didn't like.''
I got a letter from a kid from New Orleans last spring who asked me
to do something about the crime problem. He said, ``I'm 9 years old, and
I'm really scared that something's going to happen to me.'' And 9 days
later that kid was shot dead. Now, we've been waiting for 8 days for a
vote on this crime bill. We have debated this. We fought the assault
weapons ban. I thought the NRA was going to win, but we won fair and
square. We only won by two votes, but we won, the police officers and
those of us who don't want the cops to be outgunned. It was a fair and
square deal. We won. And we won in the Senate. And it's in the bill. And
I didn't think we could beat them, but we did. We worked like crazy, and
we did.
It is wrong to let the NRA, and other interest groups, too, to be
fair, who have some other bone to pick with this bill but who
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know it cannot be defeated on the merits, to use a procedural vote to
keep the American people from getting the police, from the kids from
getting this prevention money, from the people from getting the ``three
strikes and you're out law,'' from the police from getting the help they
need with the prisons, and all the rest of this. This is a good deal,
and we're not paying for it with a tax increase. We're paying for it by
reducing the size of the Federal bureaucracy by more than a quarter of a
million between now and 1999.
And I want to plead with you to ask the Congress over the weekend
not to let procedure get in the way of saving the lives and the future
of the United States. We showed up here to make decisions. If anybody
wants to vote against the crime bill, let them vote against it. There
are people who are going to vote against it because they're honestly
opposed to capital punishment or because they're honestly opposed to the
assault weapons ban or because they're honestly opposed to the
prevention funds. Let them vote against it. That's fine.
But do not let us pull another Washington, DC, game here and let
this crime bill go down on some procedural hide-and-seek. If we're going
to have a shoot out, let's do it in high noon, broad daylight, where
everybody knows what the deal is.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 10:55 a.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Charles Quimby,
manufacturing manager, Kenlee Precision Corp.; Frankie McLaurin,
steelworker, Ellicott Machine Corp.; Robert Eaton, chairman and CEO,
Chrysler Corp.; and Carol Bartz, chairman, CEO, and president, Autodesk,
Inc.