[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 11 (Monday, March 20, 1995)]
[Pages 395-396]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
The President's Radio Address

March 11, 1995

    Good morning. I ran for President to keep the American dream alive 
for the forgotten middle class and for all of those struggling to make 
it in our country, to make sure all Americans have the chance to live up 
to their God-given potential. Today in Washington, there's a great 
debate about how best to do that, and the choices we make will say a lot 
about who we are as a nation as we enter the new century.
    On one side, there's the old one-size-fits-all Washington view that 
big Government can fix every problem. On the other, there's the 
Republican contract view that the Federal Government is the cause of 
every problem. Well, I have a different view. I believe the purpose of 
Government is to expand opportunity, not bureaucracy, to empower people 
through education to make the most of their own lives, and to enhance 
our security on our streets and around the world. I believe in a 
Government that is limited but effective, lean but not mean, not a 
savior but not on the sidelines, a partner in the fight for the future. 
I believe in a Government that promotes opportunity but demands 
responsibility and that understands that we need all Americans in strong 
grassroots communities. That's what the New Covenant is all about, 
opportunity and responsibility.
    Let me give you two examples. First, with regard to welfare reform, 
I believe we should offer more opportunity in terms of education and 
work to people on welfare, but we must demand more responsibility, 
tougher child support enforcement, responsible parenting, and the 
requirement that to receive benefits, young people should be in school 
or working toward going to work.
    Or take the college loan program. Our administration believes more 
people should go to college, so we've offered more opportunity to 
millions of young people, more affordable college loans with much better 
repayment terms. But we've insisted on more responsibility. The cost to 
you, the taxpayers, of delinquent college loans has gone down from $2.8 
billion a year to $1 billion a year since I took office, opportunity and 
responsibility.
    Look at the economy. When I took office, we had no economic strategy 
for putting people first. Instead, we'd had 12 years in which trickle-
down economics had quadrupled the deficit and investments in our people 
had been ignored. There was less opportunity and less responsibility. 
Today, we're reducing the deficit by over $600 billion. The Federal work 
force is down by over 150,000 and will soon be the smallest since John 
Kennedy was President. We cut 300 programs in our first two budgets, and 
this year, we want to eliminate or combine 400 more. But while we've 
cut, we're also helping people to invest in their future, more for Head 
Start to apprenticeships, to college loans, to training for adults. The 
results are clear: This strategy is working.
    We have the lowest combined rate of unemployment and inflation in 25 
years. Since I became President, we have 6.1 million more jobs. Now, 
there's more to do. More people want work, and too many people haven't 
gotten a raise and are living with economic uncertainty. We've got to 
keep cutting unnecessary spending and investing in growing our economy.
    The old view resisted change, but the Republican contract view often 
goes too far. Let me give you another example. We want to save money and 
to change the Agriculture Department, and so do the Republicans. The old 
view just left the Agriculture Department alone, though agriculture has 
changed greatly. My approach was to close 1,200 offices and to shrink 
the bureaucracy. But the Republicans want to cut the school lunch 
program that's helped our children thrive for 50 years.

[[Page 396]]

    You'll see this debate played out in many areas. One involves 
AmeriCorps, our national service program. AmeriCorps is about 
opportunity and responsibility. You get a helping hand for your own 
education if you give one to your country. Our young AmeriCorps 
volunteers are partners with our communities, with nurses, pastors, 
police officers, doing work that won't get done any other way. They're 
walking police beats in Brooklyn, building homes in Georgia, fighting 
fires in Idaho.
    Jamie Kendrick is one of these young people. He's here with me, 
along with some other AmeriCorps volunteers today. He works with 
disadvantaged children in Baltimore. And as he does, he's helping them 
to help others. Every week, he leads more than 90 troubled kids into a 
nursing home to visit older people. The seniors get companionship and a 
chance to share their wisdom. The children, many of whom come from 
broken homes, now know older people who care about them. And Jamie knows 
he's serving others as he earns tuition for college. This is a good deal 
for Jamie, for the seniors, for the young people, and for us, too. We 
get better citizens, stronger communities, and more education.
    I want to keep AmeriCorps growing. Right now, Republicans in the 
House of Representatives are proposing to cut off opportunities in 
AmeriCorps for 15,000 people like Jamie. Then they want to end 
AmeriCorps altogether. But AmeriCorps isn't a bureaucracy, it's a 
grassroots partnership to build strong communities through opportunity 
and responsibility.
    The House Republicans want to cut all this and more, including the 
Safe and Drug-Free Schools program, the summer jobs program to pay for 
huge tax cuts costing $700 billion over 10 years and benefiting mostly 
upper income Americans. AmeriCorps, the school lunch program, the Safe 
and Drug-Free Schools programs, all together, they cost a tiny fraction 
of that.
    Now, I believe we must keep cutting spending, and we should give 
middle-class Americans tax relief to help pay for their education, their 
child rearing, their health care costs. But this proposal goes too far. 
The path to the future is through opportunity and responsibility.
    Before I close, I want to emphasize that in spite of these 
differences, I think we can make real progress now. We don't have to 
give in to gridlock. I've already signed a bill to apply to Congress the 
laws it applies to private business, and we're about to complete a bill 
to limit the ability of Congress to pass mandates on the State and local 
government without paying for them.
    There's more we can do to cut pork, not people, in the Federal 
budget. We're about to begin debate in the Senate on the line-item veto, 
an issue on which the Republican leaders and I strongly agree. We need 
to pass it and keep cutting unnecessary spending.
    This can be a very good time for our country if we all remember our 
mission: to make life easier, not harder for middle income families, to 
grow the middle class and shrink the underclass, to make the future 
brighter, not darker, for our young people, to promote opportunity and 
responsibility.
    We must keep faith with the American dream. The Jamie Kendricks of 
our country will do right by all of us if we will do right by them.
    Thanks for listening.

Note: The President spoke at 10:06 a.m. from the Oval Office at the 
White House.