[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 13 (Monday, April 3, 1995)]
[Pages 491-496]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to Students at Emory University in Atlanta

March 29, 1995

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you, Laura Sawyer, for 
your warm and generous introduction. Thank you, President Chace, for 
what you said in reminding me of our generation's obligations to the 
students here present by recalling that day now almost 32 years ago when 
I met President Kennedy.
    I have very much enjoyed this day at Emory. I thank the university 
and all responsible for making it possible for us to hold here the first 
of our conferences on the state of the American economy and where we go 
from here. I wish all of you could have been there today to hear the 
people who came to tell their stories, stories of struggle and triumph, 
stories, many of them against all the odds, what they had done to make 
their way in the economy of the 1990's and how they were looking forward 
to the next century.
    I just have one question about this before I get too serious. Where 
is Dooley? I was told if he showed up, you all would get up and leave. 
[Laughter] I hope he waits until the end if that's true.
    Let me say that I ran for the office of President because I was 
concerned about the direction of our country and the future of our 
children, basically because I believe the obligation of every generation 
of Americans is to preserve and nourish and deepen the American idea, 
the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can make the 
most of your God-given potential and live the life of your dreams and 
that you can do it without holding anyone else down and, indeed, the 
more people from all walks of life and all races and regions who are 
lifted up, the better off we'll all be. That is the American idea.
    When I met John Kennedy and when I went off to college--I was the 
first in my generation to go to college--I was the son of fairly poor 
people in the South when I was born in Arkansas right at the end of 
World War II; the per capita income of our

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entire State was only 56 percent of the national average.
    And for young people who were growing up in the South when I was 
about your age, the great question was whether we could become part of 
the great American mainstream, whether we could overcome our legacy of 
abject poverty and our legacy of racial discrimination to come together 
and learn and grow. That is not at issue anymore. Now, two Southern 
States, Georgia and Virginia, have surpassed the national average in per 
capita income. Atlanta is the home to more international companies than 
any other city in the United States. You're doing a lot of things in the 
southern region that are the envy of the rest of the world. Thirty 
percent of America's people live in the South, but 40 percent of the new 
jobs created just since I've been President have been created in this 
region.
    So the issue is not what it was a generation ago. There is a 
different issue today, which is whether we can keep the American dream 
alive for all our people in a global economy in the information age, 
which splits people apart based on their level of education and their 
skills, and at a time when the differences in our country and the 
differences throughout the world in race, religion, and other areas both 
serve as ways to unite us and to divide us. That is the great question 
of this time.
    Now, when I became President, I wanted first to get the economy 
moving again, to give people some economic hope. And we had a distinct 
strategy: reduce the deficit, expand trade, increase investment in 
education and technology, reform Government, give lower income families 
a tax break so nobody would ever be punished for work instead of 
welfare, encourage small businesses and new businesses, reduce 
regulation and give the States more authority to experiment in tough 
areas like welfare reform and health care reform. That was our agenda.
    After 2 years, we have a reduction in the deficit of $600 billion. 
This is the first time--[applause]--this is the first time since the 
mid-1960's when your Government is running at least an operating 
surplus: that is, if it were not for interest on the debt accumulated 
before we came here, we would have a budget surplus today. So at least 
our operations do not exceed our revenues.
    We have expanded trade by more than at any time in a generation. We 
have dramatically reformed the Government, already 100,000 fewer people 
working for the Federal Government if no new changes are made by the new 
Congress, which is unlikely. But if there were no changes made, the 
Government would be reduced in size over a 5\1/2\-year period by 270,000 
people, to its smallest size since I went to Washington when John 
Kennedy was President.
    And we have given vast new authority to the States to experiment in 
important areas. We have reduced regulation. We are trying to move 
forward. And perhaps most important of all, we have cut spending while 
increasing our investment in education, from expanding Head Start to 
apprenticeships for young people who don't go to college, to the Goals 
2000 program to help our schools meet tough national standards with 
grassroots reforms, to expansion of the student loan program in ways 
that make our student loans now less costly with better repayment terms.
    Now, these are important changes. The results are pretty clear. In 
the last 2 years, we've had 6.1 million new jobs; we have the lowest 
combined rate of unemployment and inflation this country has had in 25 
years. We had, in 1993, the largest number of new business 
incorporations in the history of the United States. In 1994, the 
unemployment rate in America for African-Americans dropped below 10 
percent for the first time in 20 years. The results speak for 
themselves.
    I must say, since I'm trying to spark an honest and civil bipartisan 
discussion of this, I was honored to see on the front page of your 
newspaper today one of your most distinguished alumnuses, the Speaker of 
the House, acknowledges that the economic program has brought some good 
results to the United States of America, because it has. It was the 
right thing to do, and it is moving the country forward.
    Now, so I ask you, if that's true and all that has happened, well, 
why isn't everybody happy? And why do they keep voting to change the way 
the Government's going if the policies are working? Well, I think there 
are a number of reasons, but let me offer

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a few, because they will affect your lives as Americans.
    In the first place, the global economy and all the pressures of the 
global economy and the information revolution and all the dramatic 
changes it brings, means that for the first time, even though we are 
having more jobs coming into this economy, wages are stagnant for most 
Americans. Half of the American people are working longer work weeks for 
the same or lower wages than they were making 15 years ago. And that is 
unheard of in our history.
    In addition to that, there's more inequality among the middle class. 
That's why I say over and over again, my mission is to expand the middle 
class and to shrink the under class, to give poor people a chance to 
work their way into a good life. But today, the American middle class is 
splitting apart based on whether people have the education and training 
and skills necessary to compete in the global economy for a good job 
that pays a good wage with a good future.
    The third thing that's happened is that--and a lot of your parents 
have probably been affected by this or at least work in companies that 
are affected by it--there is more instability in the work force today 
even when there is more prosperity, downsizing in government, downsizing 
in big companies, reorganizations that are constant, so that people are 
worried about whether they're going to have their job even when we have 
more jobs. And when people do lose their jobs, they tend to be 
unemployed for longer periods of times, and they tend to get a new job, 
not their old job back. All this is new in your lifetime.
    This will be the pattern you will face, but if you described all 
this to somebody 10 years ago, they'd say it couldn't happen; there's no 
way, you cannot create 6 million jobs, drive down the unemployment rate, 
explode the economy, and not have wages go up. You can't do it. It's 
impossible. Well, it happened.
    So what is our job economically? Our job is to lift the incomes and 
the sights and the aspirations of the American people. How are we going 
to do it? You have to get more high-wage jobs into this country, more 
trade, more focus on technology. You have to make sure our people can 
fill high-wage jobs. We have to educate everyone better, everyone, not 
just the college students, everyone.
    And thirdly, we have to have the right kind of Government. The great 
debate going on in Washington today is about what the proper role of our 
National Government is. The old view was that there was a big Government 
solution to every big problem and that people who were in need should be 
helped.
    The new rage in Washington is that the Government is the source of 
all the problems, and we would have no social problems, no economic 
problems, no problems at all if we had no Government. If the Government 
went away, except for national defense, everything would be peachy keen. 
[Laughter] Now, the whole theory is that every problem--all the social 
problems we've got, from teen pregnancy to welfare dependency, to the 
breakdown of life in our cities was all because we had too much 
Government trying to help people.
    Now, I have a different view from both those views. I don't think 
either one of those views is right. My experience as a Governor, my 
observation of other countries that are doing well, plain common sense, 
and the stories we heard today indicate that we need a limited but 
effective Government that costs less but does what it's supposed to do, 
and here's what I think it's supposed to do.
    I believe the National Government is still essential in creating 
opportunity even while we're shrinking bureaucracy, creating opportunity 
by making sure we've got a level playing field, and creating opportunity 
by making sure that people can make the most of their own lives. We've 
got to empower people. You can't really help people past a certain point 
except to put food on their table and to get them through the tough 
times. But you can empower people, through education and technology, to 
make more of their own lives. That's what we have to do.
    And the third thing we can do is, even in a very dynamic economy, in 
a dynamic society, we can enhance security in a legitimate way, without 
in any way undermining opportunity. We enhance security abroad when we 
make an agreement with the Russians so that, for the first time since 
nuclear weapons were invented, there are no nuclear weapons

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pointed at the people of the United States. That enhances our security.
    But if we make progress toward peace in the Middle East, we are 
enhancing our own security because of the volatile impact of that area 
on the whole rest of the world. But there are things we can do here at 
home that enhance our security as well. The family and medical leave 
law, which allows people to take a little time off when a baby is born 
or a parent is sick without losing their job, that enhances our security 
because it makes our families stronger while we keep our jobs. The crime 
bill, which puts more police officers on our street and gives our local 
communities the flexibility in choosing prevention programs that keep 
young people out of crime and off drugs, those things enhance our 
security. If we didn't have 2 million highly dysfunctional drug abusers 
in this country, the crime rate for violent crime would be about half 
what it is today. So it enhances our security when we have a safer 
society with lower crime rates. And that's--part of that role is a 
national responsibility. That's what I have tried to do.
    Now, that leads us--and I want you to watch this debate unfold in 
Washington, and you've got to decide where you fit. And your old party 
label may not give you an answer to the present problems that we face, 
because Government can't fix it all, and Government cannot walk away 
from it all. And there are a lot of hard questions that have to be 
resolved.
    But for example, my view is, there's a right and a wrong way to cut 
spending. I do think that the Agriculture Department had to be cut, but 
my view was not to reduce the school lunch program, but close 1,200 
offices, because we didn't need that many when we had fewer farmers and 
fewer problems.
    I agree that we should have reduced expenditures in the Housing and 
Urban Development Department, but what we did was to get rid of a whole 
layer of regional offices and to consolidate a lot of those various 
programs that had been kind of encrusted with bureaucracy over the 
years. We didn't want to cut a program for homeless veterans or make it 
more difficult for poor elderly people to have a roof over their head. 
There is a difference in how you cut spending. And these are 
distinctions that have to be made.
    Or in the area of education. We offered a way to cut the deficit and 
increase educational opportunities. I had student loans when I went to 
school, and I'm not ashamed of it. I'm proud of it. I'm grateful that I 
was able to get it from the previous generation. And when I got out of 
college, I paid them off. And I think when you get out of college, if 
you've got one, you ought to pay it off--[laughter]--because that's the 
way we're going to preserve it for the next generation.
    So we have reduced student loan defaults. They no longer cost the 
taxpayers $2.8 billion a year. The cost is down to $1 billion a year. 
We've reduced defaults by nearly two-thirds. We're doing a better job of 
collecting. Now that's a lot better than getting rid of the interest 
subsidy and raising the cost of student loans. That is better. That is a 
better way to do that.
    We found there were so many incentives in the old student loan 
program toward bureaucracy and paperwork and wasting money because 
basically you'd go to a bank and get the student loan. It was a 90-
percent guarantee. So if you default on the loan, does the bank have an 
incentive to sue? No, because the Government will give you 90 percent 
and 10 percent will be at least what the lawyers would cost.
    So we went into this direct loan program and we said, ``You can have 
these loans at a lower interest rate with better repayment terms when 
you get out of college. If you've got a big loan burden, you can pay it 
off as a percentage of your income.'' And now about, oh, 40 percent of 
our universities have already enrolled. We just had people there from 
the University of Florida today, a man and his wife in medical school 
saying they would owe $140,000 between them. And when they go into 
residency, if they had to start paying off their student loan under the 
old system, it would take one-half of their disposable incomes. But 
because of the new program; we cut the cost, improved the repayment 
terms, and guess what? It saves the taxpayers $10 billion over 6 years. 
So if we can give people more loans at less hassle and save $10 billion, 
why would we instead say, no, let's keep the old system and save the

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$10 billion by adding to the cost of going to college? Our way is 
better, because it's pro-education, and it makes sense, and it will take 
us into the future.
    I wish I had longer to listen to you and we could ask questions. I'd 
like to stay here 3 or 4 hours, but I've got to go to Florida. But I 
want you to think about this. Think about this debate. Every time you 
see an issue being debated in Washington, ask yourselves two questions. 
How can I cut through all the political rhetoric to figure out how this 
is going to affect me and my friends and my generation and the future of 
this country and the children I hope to have? Don't think about it in 
political terms. Think about it in terms of how it's going to affect 
your life and the future you want for yourselves and your children.
    And the second thing you ought to say is, now, what do I believe my 
country should be doing about this. Because we are going through this 
huge period of----

[At this point, there was a disturbance in the audience.]

    What did they say? Prisons are not shelters? I agree with that. Why 
are you shouting at me? Sit down. I heard you. We heard you. We heard 
you. We heard you. Sit down. We heard you. [Laughter]
    I like those guys. They believed in their free speech and mine as 
well. I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
    Audience member. Why 100,000 more cops instead of more shelters?
    The President. I'll tell you why we need 100,000 more police.
    Now, wait a minute, let's don't start a flood here. Free speech--
we'll listen. [Laughter] I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why we need 
100,000 more police. Because the violent crime rate in America has 
tripled. And this is a big fight I'm in with the Congress. They just 
want a block-grant. They want to cut the amount of money to the crime 
bill, block-grant it to the cities and States and say, basically, spend 
it however you please. I say, no, we've got to have 100,000 more police. 
Here's why; you're entitled to an answer to that.
    The violent crime rate has tripled in the last 30 years. The number 
of police officers has increased by 10 percent. In every major city 
where more police officers have been trained not simply to catch 
criminals but to prevent crime, to work with friends and neighbors and 
help kids on the street, the crime rate has gone down. One of the 
little-known good things that is happening in America today is that in 
many, many, many places, the crime rate is going down because of 
community policing.
    So I say we ought to have a 20 percent increase in the number of 
police forces, not only to catch criminals but to prevent crime from 
occurring. And a 30 percent overall increase in police is still not as 
much as a 300 percent increase in violent crime. I think we made the 
right decision on that. That's exactly the kind of debate that we ought 
to be having.
    But I also believe--I also believe we have to do more for shelter. I 
also believe we have to do more for shelter. Our administration--you 
look at the record of Secretary Cisneros and HUD. We have tried our best 
to increase that. But none of this is answering the big questions. And 
you have to answer that. I want you, every one of you, without regard to 
where you're from, what your family's income is, what your race is, I 
want every one of you to believe that your tomorrows will be whatever 
you want them to be and whatever you're willing to work hard to make 
them to be.
    I want you to be positively ecstatic at the prospect of bringing 
your own children into the world and this country and thinking about the 
21st century being the most peaceful and prosperous and exciting time 
the world has ever known. That's what I want. And that is all that 
matters, in the end, is whether we do our part.
    When I was your age, I had a professor of Western civilization who 
told me that the United States represented the finest expression of our 
civilization because it had embodied the two most important ideas: 
first, that the future can be better than the present, and second, that 
every single one of us has a personal, moral obligation to make it so. 
That is what I am trying to do in Washington. We're having a big debate 
about what the role of the National Government is. I want you to answer 
the debate by determin- 

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ing what is best for you and your future and the other people in this 
country.
    This country's in better shape than it was 2 years ago. It's going 
to be in better shape 2 years from now if I have anything to say about 
it, but you will have more to say about it than anybody else. Stand up 
for education, and stand up for the future.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:34 p.m. in the Woodruff Physical 
Education Center. In his remarks, he referred to Laura Sawyer, student 
council president.