[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 43 (Monday, October 30, 1995)]
[Pages 1918-1927]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks to the AFL-CIO Convention in New York City
October 23, 1995
The President. Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. Thank
you, Tom, for the great introduction. I wish I'd been here to hear it.
[Laughter] But I appreciate it.
You know, I've taken so many controversial positions in the last 3
years, I thought I'd come here and tell you what you ought to do in this
election. [Laughter] You should elect--listen to this--you ought to
elect an Irish-American from the Bronx who comes
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out of the Service Employees Union. [Laughter] I just want you to know
that whatever you do, I intend to be there with you every step of the
way. And I know how important this is. [Applause] Thank you.
Let me say before I get into my remarks, I have just come, as I
think all of you know, from Hyde Park and a meeting with President
Yeltsin of Russia. We made a lot of progress today in agreeing to work
toward peace in Bosnia, something that concerns every citizen of the
world whose conscience has been shocked by all the children and other
innocent people who have been killed there.
We also agreed on working together, very importantly, to control the
spread of nuclear materials, something that is a very serious problem in
the aftermath of the cold war, to minimize the prospect that terrorists
will ever be able to get small amounts of nuclear material and make
bombs out of them.
And finally, President Yeltsin agreed with me that we should go for
the strongest possible comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty next year.
And that means we will probably get it, and the world will be much safer
as a result of it.
I know that you have--all of you--and I came here more than anything
else just to thank you, because I know that you have waged a strong and
passionate grassroots campaign for a year now to oppose the cuts in
worker safety and job training, in education and health care, being
considered in the Congress. The White House mailroom is jammed with
postcards from union retirees. [Applause] Thank you. This may be the
high-tech age, but you have got the Capitol Hill switchboards groaning
with calls from your members. And I say, send more. And I know that
those ads you're running have gotten some Members of Congress suffering
with heartburn. And we just need to pour it on a little more. I thank
you for that.
I come here today with a simple message: This is a very great
country. You helped to make it that way. We're on the edge of a new
century. We're living in a time of great change. No one can perceive
clearly all the implications of that change.
We know that we've moved from an industrial age to an information
and technology age, which, as all of you know in your own experience,
even industry and agriculture is infused today with more technology. We
know we have moved from the bipolar world of the cold war to a global
village in which we have dreamed of new possibilities but also a lot of
new vulnerabilities because of the changes that are going on.
And we know we've got to somehow harness this change to benefit
ordinary people in our country and throughout the world. We have to do
it consistent with the basic values that made America great and that
make life worth living, values that your movement embodies: a commitment
to opportunity for every American; to the dignity of work; to the
commitment that the family should be strengthened and children should be
nurtured and parents should be honored; a recognition that we have to go
forward or backward together and therefore it is crazy for us to be
divided by race, by region, by income and any way that in any way saps
our strength; and the determination to keep this country the strongest
nation on Earth. Those are the things which have animated the labor
movement in the later half of the 20th century. And those are the values
that will take us into the 21st century.
Three years ago, you helped the American people to send me to
Washington to uphold these values and to turn our economy around. I had
a commitment to make the American dream real for all Americans in the
21st century and to make sure that our country would remain the
strongest country in the world. I had a simple strategy to harness
change to benefit all of us. I thought we needed to be faithful to the
mainstream values I just mentioned. I thought we needed a middle class
economic strategy to grow the middle class and shrink the under class. I
thought we needed a modern Government that would be less bureaucratic,
more entrepreneurial, but still strong enough to take care of the
business that the people need done.
The lion's share of the credit belongs to you and the rest of the
American people, but we're moving in the right direction. And I know
that our policies had something to do with it. We've got 7\1/2\ million
new jobs in this country, after the slowest job growth in
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the country since the Great Depression, in the 4 years before I took
office. We've got 2\1/2\ million more homeowners, 2 million new small
business people, the lowest combined rate of inflation and unemployment
in 25 years. Our country is safer and stronger. For the first time since
the dawn of the nuclear age, there's not a single solitary nuclear
missile pointed at the people of the United States of America. And I'm
proud of that. And by the grace of God, from Northern Ireland to Haiti,
to the Middle East, now to Bosnia, the United States is a strong partner
in pushing for peace.
Maybe most important of all, this country seems to be slowly coming
together around its values again. It's hard to turn a great country
around, but when we get going in a certain direction, we can make a real
difference. In almost every State, in this great city where you're
meeting, the crime rate is down; the murder rate is down; the welfare
rolls are down; the food stamp rolls are down. Believe it or not, the
poverty rate is down, and the teen pregnancy rate has dropped for 2
years in a row. America is coming back and moving together.
And we proved you could do it together. Instead of just condemning
the Government the way my predecessors did, we made a partnership with
the Federal employees, and in a balanced and fair and disciplined way,
we tried to downsize the Government so that this big Government attack
is a myth today. But we left our Government strong enough for the
employees that are there to do their jobs. And we just didn't throw
anybody on the street; we gave them good buyout provisions. We tried to
protect their retirement. We treated them and their families with
decency and the honor and the respect they were entitled to after the
years they had served the United States of America. And that's the way
this ought to be done everywhere.
Let me tell you what the Federal employees are doing--just a few
things. I could talk all day about it. But Federal employees working in
the Commerce Department, in the Export-Import Bank, in other areas, have
helped to create good jobs, many of them union jobs, in America by
increasing our exports 4 percent, 10 percent, and 16 percent this year,
in the last 3 years. A lot of that was done because of aggressive
actions by people who work for the United States Government.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency--we've had as many natural
disasters to deal with in the last 3 years as any time I can remember.
And it is probably the most popular arm of the Federal Government
because the Federal employees have been there in a timely, aggressive,
effective fashion when they were needed, whether it was for floods in
the Middle West or fires and earthquakes in the West or anything else.
And I am proud of that.
And let me tell you something I'm especially proud of. Business Week
magazine, which is hardly an arm of the Federal Government or the
Democratic Party, every year gives awards to businesses that perform at
the highest level of efficiency in a number of categories. And one of
their categories is for customer service over the telephone. So the
businesses that compete, for example, are Southwest Airlines or L. L.
Bean or, you know, anybody that you call on the telephone. You know who
won this year? The Social Security Administration of the Federal
Government won that award.
These Federal employees operate a Medicare program that has a 2
percent administrative cost, lower than any private insurance program in
the United States of America, something you rarely hear about in the
debate going on in Congress today. They have implemented a crime bill
that's putting 100,000 police on the streets of America, and they're
doing it on time and under budget. They have implemented the motor voter
law, the family leave law, both those things that you helped to get.
They have been able to be much tougher in capturing large quantities
of drugs before they come into this country. Without going into a bunch
of immigrant bashing, they have been able to in a disciplined way
strengthen our ability to reduce the problems of illegal immigration in
the United States. And they have fought discrimination, something that
was out of fashion for the Federal Government to do until this
administration came in. And I thank them for it.
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And guess what? We've been able to prove you can grow the economy
and be decent to working people, something that the people who were
there before and the people who are in the Congress today in dominant
positions apparently don't believe. If you look at what's happened--and
I'm sure Tom mentioned a lot of this--but when we repealed my
predecessors' anti-union Executive orders that denied American workers
their rights from private industry to public service, it didn't hurt the
economy. The economy got better, not worse. When we said in no uncertain
terms that you ought to have a fair, decent, effective NLRB, and we did
our best to provide that, the economy got better, not worse. It didn't
undermine the American economy.
When we refused to go along with repealing Davis-Bacon and the
service contract law, the economy didn't collapse; it helped to create
more high-wage jobs, not fewer. And when we began to crack down on
sweatshops where unscrupulous employers make illegal immigrants work in
prison-like conditions, depriving them of the minimum wage, overtime
pay, a safe workplace and the right to organize, it will make us
stronger, not weaker.
And when we have refused to go along with the attempts of some
people to weaken our ability to provide a safe workplace, it has not
weakened the economy; it has helped to make the American economy
stronger. It is time we accepted a fundamental lesson: Treating working
people in a decent, fair, humane, enlightened way gives you a stronger
American economy, not a weaker one.
Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
The President. Thank you.
Now, we do have some real challenges before us. You and I know that
this recovery's benefits have not been spread evenly to all Americans.
We know that we've been in a time of increasing inequality. By the way,
this is what usually happens when you move from one economic model to
another. When we move from the agricultural age to the industrial age,
the labor movement grew up because there were so many people who were
being exploited, not benefiting from the benefits of the new industrial
age. So whenever you change in a huge way the way people work and live
and relate to each other and the rest of the world, some will be well-
positioned and do well; others will not be.
That's why people need to come together, because you know in the end
you cannot sustain progress unless everybody can benefit. That's one of
the big reasons we had the Great Depression, because people did not
understand that everybody had to have a stake in the future in order for
free enterprise to flourish.
And so we have that happening today, where people who are well-
positioned tend to do well; others work harder for less and become more
insecure. There are some fundamental things we have to do about it.
First and most elementally, it is high time we raise the minimum wage.
It is wrong--[applause]. Thank you. If we do not do that, next year the
minimum wage will reach a 40-year low in purchasing power. That is not
my idea of the 21st century America I want our children and
grandchildren to live in. I want us to go up together.
It also will be good business. People will have more money to
consume, and people who are presently out of the work force will be
attracted to get back into it. There is no evidence, no evidence, and I
have read all the studies--at least I've read fair summaries of all the
studies. I don't want to--[laughter]--there is no evidence that the
minimum wage, a modest increase in the minimum wage, will cause
unemployment. There is every evidence that it will strengthen America
and bring us together.
The second thing I think we need to do is to make some changes that
recognize that there is a fundamental difference in the nature of
unemployment today and unemployment 30 years ago. The unemployment
compensation system, the whole setup was designed for people who were
laid off when there was a slowdown and then picked right back up by
their employers when the economy picked up again. It was designed to
give people a way to just get by until they got called back.
As recently as 30 years ago, 80 percent--85 percent of the people
who were laid off and collected unemployment were called back to the
same job from which they were
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laid off. Today, over 80 percent of the people who are laid off are not
called back to the same job from which they are laid off. All of you
know that. Therefore, I have proposed having the Labor Department,
working with the Education Department, create a ``GI bill for America's
workers,'' which consolidates all of our training programs, puts more
money into it, and gives every person who loses a job a right to get a
voucher to take to the program that you want, whether it's a union
apprenticeship program, a union training program, the local community
college. Whatever is best needed for the people that are unemployed,
they ought to have it. And I think we ought to do it immediately.
The second thing that we ought to do--if we're going to have a tax
cut we ought to target it to working families and what they need the
most, which is help raising their children, paying for their child care,
and getting an education. So I think we ought to have a tax deduction
for the cost of all education after high school. Now, that would help
working people a lot. That would help.
The third thing I will say is--and I know we have sometimes
disagreed on this--I believe that we win when we expand trade. So it's
not enough to have more free trade, which I favor, we also have to have
more fair trade. That's what the Japanese auto agreement was about. And
thank you, Owen Bieber, for supporting us and for finally giving us a
chance to crack some of those markets that have been denied American
workers for too long. And we're going to keep doing things like that all
the way down.
Against that background, this is how I think you ought to see this
balanced budget fight. What has worked for us the last 2\1/2\ years?
Mainstream values, work and family and responsibility and community and
treating people with dignity, all people, without regard to their race
or their region or income; believing that you have to lift working
people up if you want other people to do well: That has worked for us.
What's worked for us? Middle class economics, help the small business
people, help the entrepreneurs, also help to grow the middle class
working people and shrink the under class: That's what works. That's
what is at stake in this budget battle.
This is not--I want to say this, and I want you to go home and tell
everybody you know this--this is not a battle about balancing the
budget. That has nothing to do with what is going on in Washington
today. I gave the Congress a balanced budget. You'd be better off if we
could balance the budget. When we quadrupled the debt in 12 years before
I showed up, what happened? We had to spend more and more money on
interest on the debt. We had less and less money to invest in worker
training, in new technology, and the kinds of things that will grow the
economy, raise incomes, educate our children.
It would be a good thing to do. But we have to do that, like
everything else, consistent with our values and our objectives. That is
what is at stake. It is, what kind of America are we going to live in?
I've given the Congress a balanced budget. It cuts all kinds of
spending. It eliminates hundreds of programs. But it increases our
investment in education, in technology, in research. It protects instead
of hurts the old, the poor, the disabled, the little children on
Medicare and Medicaid. It supports investment in worker safety and in a
clean environment and in the kinds of national treasures that we share
together. That is the kind of balanced budget we need.
And that is what I want to talk to you about. I am not about to do
something that I think will prevent us from doing what I ran for
President to do: giving every American a shot at the American dream and
making sure this is the strongest, finest country in the world in the
21st century. I am not going to do that. And you shouldn't put up with
it. You shouldn't put up with it.
Now, here's what I mean. I'm going to give you the 10 greatest hits
or so of this present budget. This is not the Letterman show, and so it
won't all be funny. You may have to laugh a couple of times to keep from
crying, but here's what this is really about. Here's what the real
contract is.
We all say we believe in honoring our parents for what they have
done for us. And Medicare is a way of honoring our parents. We have to
slow the rate of growth of medical inflation. We have to secure the
Medicare
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Trust Fund. I presented a budget which will do that.
We have to recognize that health care is changing. I have no problem
with giving seniors the option to join managed care plans if they can
get lower costs or better services. I think we should do that. I'm
sympathetic with doctors and hospitals and their need to have some
changes in the law so they can work together to compete with insurance
companies to provide managed care. I'm not against that. But I'll tell
you what I am against. I'm against this budget that was passed that,
believe it or not, makes it easier to commit waste, fraud, and abuse.
When the Federal Government says up to 10 percent of the money may be
wasted, they passed a budget to make it easier to commit waste, fraud,
and abuse but harder for the poorest, the oldest, and the sickest
seniors to make sure their health care needs are met. That is wrong. I
don't like it. I won't support it. And if it passes, I will veto it. It
is wrong.
I want to talk to you about the Medicaid program. There's a lot of
AFSME workers here who work in health care institutions that depend upon
Medicaid. New York City has a whole health care network that depends not
just on Medicare but Medicaid. Most people think Medicaid is the welfare
health program. Let me tell you--70 percent of the Medicaid money goes
to the elderly and the disabled for nursing home care, for in-home care,
for physician care. Thirty percent of the Medicaid money does go to poor
people, not all of them on welfare, some of them even working for very
poor wages. And most of that money goes to take care of the little
children. Over one in five children in the United States of America is
eligible for Medicaid help for health care. And all those kids, they may
not be in your family, but they're your kids. And 20 years from now,
they're either going to be in jail or in school or in the workplace. And
they're going to be a big part of our future. And I don't know about
you, but when I retire, I want them out there working, making lots of
money, taking care of me. And I want to take care of their health right
now.
So my idea of the 21st century is not a Medicaid program that takes
away the money that helps the poorest seniors to pay their part of the
Medicare program. That's right; they get rid of it, $10 billion. We help
the poorest old folks pay their copays. We help them pay the fees they
owe under Medicare because they don't have any money. There's a lot of
old folks out there. There's folks still living on $300 a month. This
budget takes it all away. And there's been a study which estimates that
it may take at least a million elderly people out of the Medicare
program.
I was in Texas the other night at a fundraiser, and a doctor came up
to me. A doctor came up to me, and he said, ``You keep fighting on
this.'' He said, ``I've been a doctor a long time. I remember when I did
not have any older patients, before Medicare, before Medicaid, when I
had no older patients, because older people were too proud to come to
the doctor if they couldn't pay their bills. So a lot of them just
stayed home and got sick and died.'' It is wrong. I will not put up with
it. It is not right. And you shouldn't put up with it either. It is not
right. It is not right.
I want to tell you one more thing about this Medicaid plan. It says,
``Oh, we're going to block-grant this to the States. We're going to get
these terrible Federal rules and regulations out of the State's hair.''
I was a Governor for 12 years. I used to sing that song. [Laughter] I
believe in that.
Our administration--don't you let anybody tell you this is about
State's rights--our administration has given more waivers, more freedom
to get out from under Federal rules to State governments to experiment
with moving people from welfare to work or serving more people, getting
health insurance to more people, than the last two administrations
combined. More in 2\1/2\ years than they did in 12 years. This is not
about giving the States flexibility.
But let me tell you the kind of things they want to let the States
do and what they don't want to let the States do, and it will tell you
what's really behind this. They've adopted their Medicaid programs. And
among other things, they say that the State ought to get Medicaid block-
granted and they ought to have the right to get rid of the so-called
spousal impoverishment rule. That's Government language. You know what
that means? That means if an elderly couple lived to be 78 years old and
they've been married 50
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years and they're living on their Social Security and one of them gets
so sick that he or she needs to go in the nursing home, they want to
give back to the State governments the right to tell the one that
doesn't go to the nursing home, ``You want your wife or your husband to
get any help? You've got to sell your car, sell your house, clean out
your bank account, give it to us, and then we'll give you a little help.
We don't know how you're going to live.'' I don't like that. That is not
my idea of the 21st century I want to live in.
But you know what? In the next breath, do you know what they did?
They took away from the States--they say, ``We're going to give you lots
of flexibility and a little less money. And we want you to run it
however you want to, but, oh, oh, there's one thing you've been doing
we're not going to let you do anymore. Right now you can bargain with
the drug companies to get the lowest possible price for drugs for
elderly people and little kids. And we're not going to let you do that
anymore, because the drug companies don't want us to. So I'm sorry, you
will have to do more with less money, but here's something you can't
do.'' I don't know about you, but I don't get driving up the price of
drugs and driving old folks into the poor house. I don't think that's
right. That's not the America I want to live in. And I'm going to do
everything I can to stop it. And I want you to help me.
Now, I want to talk to you about education. Everybody's for
education. You ask anybody in the Congress, are you for education? They
say, absolutely. But you've always got to ask the next question; the
first question is never enough. I'll tell you--you know the best story I
know about that--you know, there's a--this minister was sort of a--not a
very effective minister, and people would go to sleep in his sermons.
And he was overcome, and he prayed day-in and day-out for inspiration so
he could finally give a barn-burning sermon and everybody would stand
up. And their hearts would be purified, and their spiritual zeal would
be great.
So he worked so hard on this. And he showed up, and he gave the
sermon of his life. And people were stomping and clapping and even in
this staid church were shouting amen. And he got to the final line of
his sermon; he said, ``I want everybody that wants to go to heaven to
stand up.'' And the whole congregation stood up, except one woman that
hadn't missed church in 45 years. And he was crestfallen. He said,
``Sister Jones, don't you want to go to heaven when you die?'' And she
leapt up, she said, ``I'm sorry, I thought you were trying to get up a
load to go right now.'' [Laughter]
So you always got to ask the next question. Everybody's for
education. Our budget balances the budget and increases our investment
in education by $40 billion--by $40 billion over 7 years--by making
choices and setting priorities. Why? Because if 22 percent of the kids
in this country are poor enough to be on Medicaid, they need a little
extra help through Head Start to get off to a good start in school,
because a lot of schools are too poor to have the class sizes they need
or the computers we want them to have; because a lot of kids are in
danger going to and from school, and we need to give schools more help
to remain safe and drug-free; because we want to make it possible for
everybody to go to college.
When I ran for President, I came here and I made a specific
commitment. I said if you will vote for me and get me elected, I'll do
everything I can to cut the cost of college loans, to improve the
repayment on college loans, and then to be tougher on people who
default. We cut the default rate in half, but we also cut the cost of
college loans. We made repayment easier. And to boot, we added more
scholarships.
And enrollment is going up, but nowhere near what we need. I want
every middle class family in this country and every poor family in this
country to be able to send their kids to college. And I don't want
anybody ever from now on to have to walk away from a college education
because of the cost. That's my idea of the 21st century.
So when the Congress presents a budget that says, no, it's all right
if several thousand more kids--20, 30, whatever it is--more kids don't
get to go to Head Start and we have to remove them; it's all right if we
don't help as many schools with safe and drug-free programs as we were;
it's all right if a whole lot of schools now can't use that money for
[[Page 1925]]
their poor kids for the smaller classes and the computers; it's okay if
because the people that lost money on the direct loan program, the
special interests, want their money back, so we're just going to kill
this program that the Government's running that's got lower cost college
loans and better repayment terms. We're going to get rid of that, and to
boot, we'll get rid of somewhere between 150,000 and 380,000
scholarships. I don't know about you folks, that is not the kind of
America I want for the 21st century. And I'm going to do everything I
can to stop it. It is wrong. And it's bad for our economy. It doesn't
make sense.
And we're getting a little closer to home now. You say to people,
are you for family values? Why, of course we are. Who could be against
it? Most of those who were there last time--they're in the majority
now--when we asked them to stand up for family values by adopting the
family and medical leave law, they said no. And we said yes. And there
are families that are stronger today because of the family and medical
leave law because they don't lose their jobs when there's a kid sick or
a parent dying or one of them gets sick. It's a better country. It's a
stronger country. And it's a stronger economy because of that.
So what do we mean? Well, family values to me means safe streets, a
clean environment, economic opportunity, fair taxes, secure pensions;
let's just start there. Well, at least one House of Congress wants to
eliminate our program to put 100,000 police on the street and to give
communities--the only block grant they don't like is the one we passed
to give communities the power to do what they can to prevent crime, to
give our children something to say yes to instead of something to say no
to, the one all the mayors love, all the Governors love, everybody
thinks is great--they don't like that. Well, making us less safe is not
my idea of family values.
Then they want to put 315 of our national parks and other national
facilities up for sale, including Franklin Roosevelt's home where I was
today. I know you find some of this unbelievable, but it's true. That's
on the list. They have proposed to do all kinds of things to make it
harder to preserve clean air, clean water, safe food. That's not my idea
of family values. In economic opportunity, there's not a company in
America that if they could avoid it in 1995 would cut research,
technology, or training. But this budget cuts research, technology, and
training. That's not my idea of how to build strong families. And worst
of all, there's $148 billion of hidden taxes and fees on working
families while they propose to give people in my income group a tax cut.
And that's not my idea of the kind of 21st century I want to live in.
Now, I want you to listen to this. The Wall Street Journal, hardly
an arm of the Democratic Party--[laughter]--reported the other day that
if this budget passes with all of the taxes in it and all the tax cuts
in it, with all the tax cuts in it the group of Americans as a group who
make less than $30,000 a year, which is 51 percent of the American
people, will have greater tax hikes than tax cuts. I get a tax cut, and
we're going to soak people like that?
You know, in 1993, one of the best things about our economic program
was that we doubled the family tax credit, the earned-income tax credit,
which had bipartisan support, signed into law by Gerald Ford, supported
by Ronald Reagan, increased by George Bush, and we doubled it. Why?
Because I wanted to be able to say to the American people, ``Look, you
got to choose work and family over welfare and dependence. And anybody
who'll work 40 hours a week with children in the house--I don't care how
low their pay is--we will not tax them into poverty. We will use the tax
system to lift them out of poverty.'' That is the principle. That is the
principle. And it's the right thing to do.
I mean, I thought the game plan was we were supposed to be growing
the middle class and shrinking the under class. They want to cut this by
more than I increased it. They want to kick people out of the middle
class and then pull the ladder up so poor people can't work their way
into it. You want to get more people on welfare? Raise taxes on people
with two kids making $11,000-$12,000 a year, and they will say, no thank
you. This does not make sense. It violates our values. It violates our
interest. It is bad for the economy. It is wrong for America. And if I
can stop it with a veto pen or with
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my voice or whatever it takes, I am going to do everything I can to stop
it. And I want you to help me, too.
Audience members. Veto! Veto! Veto!
The President. This is the last issue I want you to focus on. These
are great hits. I want you to remember this. I want you to go home, I
want you to talk to friends in the workplace, and I want you to talk to
friends who aren't in your union. I want you to talk to people at
church, at the bowling alley, at the ballpark, wherever two or more are
gathered. I want you to talk to people. I want people to know about
this. This is their country, just like it's your country. This is not
about me or the Republicans in Congress. It's about the future of the
American family, the future of the American workplace, the future of the
United States. And so I want you to listen to this. This is the greatest
last hit.
During the 1980's, when--you know, that ``everything goes'' decade
where everything was going to trickle down to ordinary people--thousands
and thousands of corporations transferred some $20 billion out of their
employees' pension funds for buyouts and other purposes. An awful lot of
workers lost their life savings. Last December, one of the proudest
things I was able to do in the last Congress, even after the November
election, the Congress passed a bill that saved 8\1/2\ million American
pensions and stabilized 40 million others that were in danger of being
in trouble. I don't know what the retirement income of 48\1/2\ million
Americans is worth to the strength, the stability of America; to our
pro-family, pro-work values; to our economic future, but I think it's
worth an awful lot.
Now, as if we haven't learned anything from the eighties and didn't
have to do that, this Republican budget would allow companies to
withdraw money from their workers' pension funds to use it for whatever
reason they want.
Audience members. No-o-o!
The President. For whatever reason they want. Corporate buyouts,
bonuses, any reason.
Now, folks, we just had to fix this last year. You know, I don't
remember as well as I used to; my circuits are kind of jammed. But I can
at least remember what I did last year. [Laughter] That is not my idea
of what I want America to look like in the 21st century, taking good
middle class people that worked hard all their lives, paid into their
pension, showed up at work, did everything they were supposed to, and,
``Oh, I'm sorry, your pension is gone.'' One of two things is going to
happen: Either the Government will have to bail it out again, in which
case the deficit reduction won't take place. Or we'll throw them into
the street, and we'll one more time shrink the middle class and grow the
under class. Say no to that. Say no to looting the pension funds. Say
no. It's wrong. It's wrong.
And look, the thing that bothers me about this is that this budget
would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory This country is in better
shape than it was 2\1/2\ years ago. We're moving in the right direction.
What we need to do is build on what we've done, not tear it down. We
need to build on middle class economics. We need to build on an economy
that has the largest number of new small businesses in history. We need
to build on the best time for education in the last 30 years, in the
last Congress. We need to build on medical reforms that are slowing the
rate of medical inflation without stripping elderly people of the
security and dignity of knowing that their health care is there. We do
not need to tear it down. We need to prove we can make the environment
and the economy go together, not walk away from our common
responsibilities.
Folks, this is about more, even more, than all the things that we
are concerned about that directly affect any of us individually. This is
about what kind of country we're going to be. This is about what kind of
people we're going to be. It's about whether we're going to live by the
values we all say we believe in. It's about whether the American dream
is going to be alive in the 21st century. And what we really have to do
is to do what that sign says. If we'll just stand up for America's
working families, if we'll just do what we know is right, if we'll use
every tool at our command--I will use the tools at my command, but I
want you to go home, and I want you to talk to people in the streets and
say we're moving this country. This country is going into the 21st
century. Don't let these people take us back. If it takes a veto, you'll
[[Page 1927]]
have it. But I need you in the streets standing up for America's future.
God bless you, and thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom at the
Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. In his remarks, he referred to Tom
Donahue, president, AFL-CIO, and Owen Bieber, former president, United
Auto Workers.