[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 13 (Monday, April 3, 1995)]
[Pages 487-491]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at Session I of the Southern Regional Economic Conference in 
Atlanta

March 29, 1995

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Secretary Brown, for that 
introduction, and thank you for the magnificent job you have done as 
Secretary of Commerce, promoting the interest of American businesses and 
American workers throughout the United States and all across the world. 
As far as I know, there is no precedent for the efforts that you have 
made or the results you have achieved. President Chace, thank you for 
your remarks this morning, and thank you for hosting us. Governor 
Miller, as always, thank you for bringing us back to Atlanta and to 
Georgia. Thank you for giving me such a nice place to sleep last night.
    You heard Secretary Brown talk about this economic conference in the 
context of the one we did 2 years ago in Little Rock. Let me say that 
that conference, I believe, was very successful and did play a major 
role in helping us to finalize the economic strategy that we have 
pursued for the last 2 years.
    We wanted to come back now to the country and do some regional 
economic conferences for some reasons I will explain in a moment. We 
thought we should begin in the South and we should begin here in 
Atlanta. This city and this university are remarkable examples of where 
we ought to be going as a people. This is a place of opportunity and 
responsibility where people are

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working together. And I can say, I think, for all Americans, we can 
hardly wait for another 479 days to pass so the Olympics will begin 
here.
    As the industrial age gives way to the information age and all of 
our economies are linked as never before, the South has really done a 
remarkable job of tapping in to all the opportunities that are 
presented. Atlanta has become a magnet for worldwide corporate 
headquarters. Miami has become a financial center for all of the 
Caribbean and Latin America. South Carolina and Tennessee have become 
new homes for manufacturing operations from all around the world. 
Charlotte has become a new national home for banking. And obviously, 
three letters, CNN, prove that this part of our country is the center of 
a global information network.
    This conference, as I said, is designed to be the first of several 
regional conferences to follow up on what has happened in the last 2 
years. The remarkable group of people that came to Little Rock in 1992, 
some of whom are here today and are participating in this second round 
of conferences, really gave us a lot of ideas to take to Washington that 
were consistent with the things I had advocated in my campaign but in 
some ways went beyond them.
    The strategy that we brought to Washington was fairly 
straightforward. We wanted to reverse the trickle-down economics and 
reverse the idea that the Government had no affirmative responsibility 
to be a partner in growing the economy, increasing the number of 
entrepreneurs, expanding the middle class, and shrinking the under 
class.
    We did that with a strategy that was designed to reduce the deficit, 
expand trade, increase our investment in the education and training of 
our people in the technologies of the future, to help the areas that 
were left behind or that were subject to sweeping changes because of 
defense downsizing, for example, and to reform the Government, to make 
it cost less and do better.
    The results, I think, are clear: We've had $600 billion in deficit 
reduction. We have already cut or eliminated 300 programs with 400 more 
on the way for our new budget. The Federal Government is at its smallest 
size in a long time. We have already reduced it by 100,000. And for the 
budget already adopted, over a 6-year period it will go down by 272,000, 
which will make it the smallest it's been since President Kennedy was in 
office.
    Our economic plan changed the tax structure in ways that made it, I 
think, more fair and more conducive for economic growth, while income 
taxes were raised on corporations with incomes of over $10 million in 
1\1/2\ percent of our people. Working families with modest incomes 
received a significant tax cut. This year the average family of four 
with an income of $25,000 a year or less will pay about $1,000 less in 
income taxes. That's 6 million families in the Southern States alone.
    Ninety percent of the small businesses, the engine of economic 
growth, were made eligible for tax cuts by increasing the expensing 
provisions by 70 percent. We created empowerment zones and enterprise 
communities to give incentives for people to invest in areas that had 
been left behind. Four of the nine major empowerment zones, which got 
big tax incentives for private enterprise to invest in them, are located 
in the southern region, including Atlanta, the Kentucky Highlands, the 
Mississippi Delta, and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
    Last year, there were twice as many loans to small businesses in the 
SBA under the then-leadership of Erskine Bowles from North Carolina and 
now under the leadership of Phil Lader from South Carolina. There were 
twice as many loans in the South from the SBA than in any succeeding 
year ever, including the year before I took office. That includes over 
11,000 businesses in loans worth over $2 billion.
    So that strategy was our economic strategy. It went with our 
strategy to expand trade: NAFTA, GATT, the Asian-Pacific region, the 
Summit of the Americas in Miami, the national export strategy that 
Secretary Brown has worked so hard on to sell more of our products and 
services around the world.
    We increased investment in education from Head Start to making more 
college loans available to people. And we certainly began not only to 
shrink the size of Government but to change the nature of Government, to 
let States have more say over welfare reform and health care reform, to 
move

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toward what we have now done in this year, reducing the unfunded 
mandates on State and local governments, and to change the nature of 
regulation under the Vice President's reinventing Government effort.
    We have, for example, just announced that small businesses will be 
allowed, when they're first fined, not to pay the fine but instead to 
put the fine into correcting whatever the problem is with a Government 
agency; that Government agencies will be given the authority not even to 
impose a fine in the first instance, to waive it, on small businesses. 
The Environmental Protection Agency is reducing the paperwork burden by 
25 percent. It will save 20 million hours of work for American citizens 
in the private sector this year.
    So these are the things that we have worked so hard to do. What have 
been the results? Well, you heard them already, but I'd like to say 
again. We've had over 6 million new jobs in this economy, and 1993 was 
the best year in American history for small businesses and start-ups. 
The combined rate of unemployment and inflation is at a 25-year low. We 
have the African-American unemployment rate in the United States below 
10 percent for the first time in 20 years. Unemployment in the South has 
dropped even more than in the country as a whole. The South has 30 
percent of the population but has generated 40 percent of the new jobs 
that have come into this economy in the last 2 years.
    Now, that is the good news. Why are we having this economic 
conference? Because the news is not all good and because we are under a 
great responsibility to try to keep this economic recovery going of high 
growth and low inflation.
    Let me talk first about the news that's not all good. You may wonder 
with these numbers, which are better than we've had in decades, why poll 
after poll after poll says that people think the country is not going in 
the right direction. One reason is that over half the American people in 
spite of this recovery, are working longer workweeks for the same or 
lower wages than they were making 15 years ago. This is a new phenomenon 
in the global economy, that wages are stagnant.
    The other thing is that nearly everybody knows someone who's been 
part of a restructuring, a downsizing, some market change in a larger 
economic unit, which means that even when times are good, people think 
things are changing so fast that their level of security, their sense of 
stability, of rootedness, of reward for work is more fragile than it has 
been in the past.
    It's funny, you know, this economic strategy that I've tried to 
pursue basically grew out of my experience as a southern Governor, when 
the real southern strategy of the seventies and eighties in the South 
was better education, more jobs, and a closer partnership between the 
public and private sectors and between people of all races and 
backgrounds. That's the strategy, the real southern strategy that lifted 
the South from the sixties forward. And it's ironic that in the country 
now with this problem of wage stagnation and the splitting apart of the 
middle class, the challenge we have, in a funny way, is a lot like the 
challenge that I faced when I first became a Governor.
    You know, most of us who were born in the South remember when nearly 
everybody was poor. Zell Miller gave that magnificent speech at the 
Democratic Convention about living in the house his mother built 
herself. When I was born in Arkansas, the per capita income of my State 
was 56 percent of the national average. And most of us who are natives 
to this region thought that a major part of our life's mission would be 
getting the American dream to all the people who lived in our region, 
without regard to their race or condition of birth.
    Now, the challenge for America is whether or not, even in the midst 
of all our economic triumphs and when we are the world's only military 
superpower, we can preserve the American dream for all of our people. 
Can we avoid this wage stagnation? Can we avoid this increasing 
inequality in the United States that is gripping every advanced economy 
in the world as we become more globalized, as we become more dependent 
on technologies, as things change faster and education determines income 
more than ever before? That is the great challenge.
    And that's why we are working now in Washington to continue what 
we've been

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doing for the last 2 years but also to focus on things like the middle 
class bill of rights, the education tax deduction, more training for 
workers who are unemployed or underemployed, raising the minimum wage, 
working on welfare reform, things we think will raise incomes and bring 
people together again.
    So let me close with this. I hope that all of you think that this 
will be a day well spent. From my point of view, I think we should be 
focused intensely on three questions. One is: Even though all 50 States 
are growing now--it's the first time in a long time that's happened--
what are the differences in the economies of the various States in this 
region, in this region, and the rest of the country? Are there specific 
things that ought to be done in the southern region or within the 
Southern States that are different from what we might be doing as a 
whole? Question one.
    Question two: What is the proper role of the National Government in 
working with you to build this economy and to make it better? That's the 
great debate in Washington we're having today. It used to be the 
prevailing theory was there was a big-Government solution for every big 
problem. Now, the prevailing theory is the Government would mess up a 
one-car parade, and if it didn't exist, America wouldn't have any 
problems. Both theories are wrong and are contradicted by all experience 
everywhere in the world. Not Japan, not Germany, or any country ever 
became a great industrial power without trying to develop the capacities 
of the people and having a coordinated economic strategy and having a 
framework within which markets could succeed.
    So, what should we be doing? What should we be doing? What have we 
done that's right? What have we done that's wrong? What should we stop 
doing? What should we start doing? That's the second question.
    The third great question is the one that I mentioned earlier, and 
it's the national question. And it is at the core of what we will have 
to be concerned about, I predict to you, for decades: How do you 
preserve the American idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, 
you can do better; that we will always be able to grow the middle class 
and shrink the under class and spark an unprecedented number of 
entrepreneurs? How do you preserve that American idea in the global 
economy? That is the great challenge of this era.
    When this day is over, if we honestly address those three questions: 
Are there still differences about the South or within the South that we 
need to be sensitive to; what's the role of the Federal Government; what 
can we do to raise incomes and increase stability for people who are 
working hard and playing by the rules, then I think you will believe 
your day was well spent.
    In 1986, I was the chairman of the Southern Growth Policies Board, 
and I asked the former Governor of Mississippi, Bill Winter, to be the 
chairman of our project on the future of the South. Every 6 years, 
there's a report on the future of the South. The Secretary of Education, 
Dick Riley, issued one in 1980. We've been at this a long time. We 
called our report in 1986, ``Halfway Home and A Long Way To Go,'' which 
captured the fact that the South was moving rapidly compared to the rest 
of the country but wasn't there yet. Now we're in one of the two 
Southern States that has a per capita income above the national average. 
We know the South is growing more rapidly than the rest of the country 
and moving quickly. But there are still differences, and there are 
profound challenges facing the United States.
    So I would say to you, we're more than halfway home. The southern 
strategy has found its finest expression, perhaps, here in Georgia and 
with the administration of this Governor. I noticed--one thing I have to 
brag on him for--these HOPE scholarships so that any young person in 
Georgia who has a certain grade-point average gets a full tuition 
scholarship for 4 years to any institution in the State, public 
institution in the State--anybody. That's the kind of strategy and the 
kind of programs that we ought to be supporting everywhere in the United 
States.
    So we've done very well, but these three great questions still have 
to be asked and answered. We're going to ask these questions all across 
the country, but I think we did the right thing to start here.
    Let me close with this. In 2 weeks, on April 12th, we will honor the 
50th anniversary of President Roosevelt's death in Warm

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Springs, Georgia, about 60 miles from here. On the day he died, 
Roosevelt was drafting a speech for Thomas Jefferson's birthday, a 
speech he obviously never got to deliver. The last words written in his 
own hands were these: ``The only limit to our realization of tomorrow 
will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active 
purpose.''
    One final problem we have are the doubts the American people have 
about today. If you look at what has been achieved in this State, in 
this region in the last 10 years, there is a lot more room for hope than 
for doubt.
    Thank you very much.
    Now, to provide an economic overview, I would like to call on the 
Secretary of the Treasury, Bob Rubin. As most of you know, he was, until 
he became the Secretary of the Treasury, succeeding Lloyd Bentsen, he 
was the President's National Economic Adviser and the head of the 
National Economic Council, a position now occupied by Laura Tyson, who 
was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
    One of the important things we did in our economic strategy, which 
has received virtually no attention but which I predict historians will 
credit for a long time to come, was to establish a National Economic 
Council, like the National Security Council, that met on a regular 
basis, included all the various actors in the Federal Government, and 
forced us to coordinate our economic policy in ways that had never been 
done before. It is obvious that a big part of our national security in a 
global economy depends upon our national economic strength.
    I am convinced that that institution now will endure through future 
Presidencies of both parties and unforeseen developments. And I think 
one of the reasons it will endure is because Bob Rubin, as the first 
person to head the Economic Council, did such a good job in bringing 
people together and making it work. So I'd like to call on Secretary 
Rubin for a brief overview of the economy as we see it today.
    Mr. Secretary.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 9 a.m. in the Cannon Chapel 
Building at Emory University. In his remarks, he referred to William M. 
Chace, president, Emory University, and Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia.