[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 6 (Monday, February 12, 1996)]
[Pages 199-206]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Governors' Association Conference

February 6, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Governor Thompson, Governor Miller, 
fellow Governors and friends. It is always good to be back here, and I 
very much appreciate what you said, Governor Thompson. I must say, I 
also enjoyed standing outside in the hall and listening to the last 
three or four speakers discuss the last resolution. It made me homesick 
and proud that I once was a member of this body.
    Let me begin, Governor, by congratulating you on the work that you 
have done on Med- 

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icaid, on welfare, and on a number of other issues. And let me also 
thank the lead Republican and Democratic Governors who worked on the 
Medicaid issue. I see you around this table. You were good enough to 
work with us in the White House to keep us up with what you were doing, 
to enter into intense discussions with us, and I'll have a little more 
to say about it in a minute. But this is, in any case, a very impressive 
accomplishment that all of you have voted for a new framework that will 
preserve the guarantee of health care coverage to the people who need 
it, and give the States the flexibility they need to operate the 
program.
    Let me also say, in general, this Governors' conference has, I 
think, been in the best tradition of the National Governors' 
Association, as people have worked together in good faith across party 
lines to find real solutions to real problems.
    I'd also like to express my appreciation to Senator Dole for what he 
said earlier here today, and the genuine spirit of cooperation that he 
evidenced in his remarks, I must say, was also evidenced in the more 
than 50 hours we have spent together in discussing the budget. And, like 
him, I believe we will get a budget deal. I didn't like everything he 
said about wanting to spend some more time around the White House next 
year. [Laughter.] But then again, I was a little concerned the other 
night when Gary Morris was singing at the White House, and I discovered 
that Governor Thompson and Governor Engler and Governor Voinovich were 
checking out Al Gore's office. [Laughter]
    But it's good for America, this kind of competition. I also want to 
say, Governor Branstad, I was encouraged to hear Senator Dole say he 
thought we'd get a farm bill pretty soon. We've got a 15-year high in 
wheat prices and about an 18-year high in bean prices, and corn is about 
3.60. We need a farm bill, and we need to strike while the iron's hot so 
we can keep this going.
    This has been a good meeting for you, and it's been a good day for 
me. And yesterday and the day before, when you were at the White House, 
were good days, because I always enjoy working with the Governors.
    As I said at the dinner, I think the framers would be pleased by 
this great debate in which we are engaged in Washington and in which you 
are also engaged. It goes beyond the very important questions of what 
government should do in our society and what we should not do, to the 
question of which level of government should do certain things and how 
they should be done. This movement is part of the sweeping changes now 
going on in our society.
    We see that the changes in how we work and live together in a world 
that is dominated by information technologies and the markets of the 
global village are changing the way everybody does business. And I'd 
like for you to take just a minute before we get back into the substance 
of the issues that you've been working on to step back and look at the 
context in which this debate is taking place.
    We are living in a world that includes dramatic changes in the 
nature of work, principally defined by work becoming more and more 
identified by the content of ideas and information, and less with 
physical labor. We have changes in the nature of work organizations: 
they're more flexible, they're less bureaucratic, and often they're 
smaller. It's interesting in that all the new businesses that have been 
created--new jobs that have been created in our country, for the last 15 
years the Fortune 500 companies have reduced their aggregate employment 
in each of those years. In the last 3 years, however, small businesses 
owned by women alone have created more new jobs than the Fortune 500 has 
laid off--changes in the nature of work organizations.
    And finally, there are dramatic changes in the nature of markets, 
both financial markets and markets for goods and services. They are more 
instantaneous in their movement and more worldwide in their scope.
    Now these changes have given our country, with a strong and diverse 
economy, what I called in the State of the Union a great new age of 
possibility. I believe that. I believe that more of our people will be 
able to live out their own dreams than ever before. But these changes 
have also done what fundamental changes always do. They have led to a 
great uprooting in the patterns of life and work in America. And there 
are new challenges to us to preserve the American dream for all citizens 
who are willing to work

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for it, to maintain our cherished values and our leadership for peace 
and freedom.
    This is the context in which this debate should be viewed. Look at 
the economic picture. America in the last 3 years has almost 8 million 
new jobs, the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 
years, a 15-year high in homeownership, an all-time high in exports, 
which has in large measure led to those high prices for farm products 
that I mentioned.
    The auto industry leads the world again. We've had 700,000 new jobs 
in construction. We're number one in the manufacture of 
telecommunication satellites, and each of the last 3 years our people 
have set successive records for the formation of new businesses and for 
the creation of new self-made millionaires, not people who were given 
their money but people who made it with the opportunities that were 
there for them in this country.
    This is a remarkable thing. But it is also remarkable that, for the 
first time in our history, all this occurred while more than half of the 
American people didn't get a raise and felt increasing insecurity about 
job loss or the loss of health care or pension benefits or the ability 
to educate their children.
    Yesterday I had a conversation with an old friend of mine from a 
Western state who is a marvelously successful person now in his own 
right. And by pure accident of history, 40 years ago and more, he and 
his brother and I attended the same little brick grade school in my 
hometown in Arkansas. He's a terrific success, he's had a great life. 
His brother made a great success of his life, but at the age of 49, he 
has already been laid off twice from two different companies simply 
because the companies were bought by other companies, not because he was 
unproductive, not because there was something wrong with him, not 
because he didn't do what he was supposed to do in life.
    The other day I got a letter from a friend of mine that I keep in 
touch with, a man I went to grade school with. He came from a very poor 
family. He was the first person from his family who graduated from 
college. And he told me that after 9\1/2\ months of looking he had 
finally gotten another job. He was an engineer with a Fortune 500 
company, who at the age of 49, along with two other 49-year-old 
engineers, was laid off. They had children to educate, things to do. And 
this is also a factor of this great churning economy. So we have to see 
this economy in terms of all of its possibilities and its continuing 
challenges, which presents a paradox.
    You can imagine what the ordinary person feels going home at night 
after work and turning on the television and hearing how great the 
economy is and then filtering it through their own personal experience. 
It just depends upon whether their experience conforms to the 
statistics, whether they really buy it.
    Our challenge is to figure out how to set and keep in motion all 
these wonderful changes, and shape them in a way that makes the American 
dream available to everybody again. It's a great challenge but we can do 
it. If you look at the world, you see the same thing. America has been 
very fortunate, not only in the trade numbers I mentioned but to play a 
role in leading the world toward peace and freedom and greater security, 
not only in the obvious places like Northern Ireland and the Middle East 
and Bosnia and in Haiti, where tomorrow for the first time in the 
history of the country they will have a peaceful democratic transfer of 
power, but in reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, extending the Non-
Proliferation Treaty, passing START II, trying to get a comprehensive 
test ban treaty this year.
    But at the same time we know, and we have seen in our own country, 
that there are new threats of our security that are a function of the 
age of possibility, where people can move around in a hurry, where 
people can get information on the Internet about how to build bombs, 
where anybody can be a neighborhood terrorist because of the high-tech 
information you can get as long as you've got a computer, where someone 
in Tokyo can break open a little vial of poison gas and kill hundreds of 
people.
    So we have new challenges, even as we become more secure. And we see 
it in terms of what's happened to our ability to maintain our basic 
values. I am profoundly encouraged that the crime rate, the welfare and 
food stamp rolls, the poverty rate, and the teen pregnancy rate, and 
even the divorce rate,

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are down in the last couple of years. I think that is a very good thing 
for America. But let's face it, we all know they're still too high. And 
we all know that we pay a price together because they are.
    So I say to you that as we debate this great transformation of 
government, the question we really ought to keep in our mind is: Are the 
changes we're making going to contribute to making the American dream 
available to all our people? Are we going to accelerate all the 
wonderful things that have brought us this age of possibility and meet 
the challenge? Are they going to help people to solve their own 
problems? Are they going to help families to solve their own problems? 
Are they going to help communities to work together to solve their own 
problems?
    That, it seems to me, is the great question of this age. Government 
should change just like all other big organizations that are changing 
because the demands are changing, the objectives are changing, we are 
doing what the framers intended us to do. And in the exercise you have 
performed here in the last 3 days, by getting together and working hard 
and dealing with these tough issues and always trying to consider what 
the human impact of the changes was going to be, you have done what the 
framers knew we would have to do from time to time if our great country 
was going to endure.
    In the State of the Union, I tried to outline what I think our major 
challenges are, and let me just briefly recount from here. I think as a 
people--not the Government's challenges, our people's challenges--to 
build stronger families and better childhoods for all of our children, 
to open educational opportunity for every single citizen, for children 
and for adults for a lifetime, to develop a new economic security for 
all families that are willing to work for it in a way that supports the 
dynamism of this economy and doesn't undermine it, to make our streets 
safer and take them back from gangs and drugs, to make crime the 
exception rather than the rule in America again, to provide a cleaner 
and healthier environment for today and tomorrow in a way that grows and 
doesn't shrink the economy, to maintain our leadership for freedom and 
peace in the world, and especially for us to reinvent, to change our 
Government so that it works better and inspires more trust.
    I believe the central lesson I have learned here in the last 3 years 
is that the genuine debate in America is not between big Government and 
small Government. We already have the smallest Government we've had 
since 1965. It's 205,000 people smaller than it was the day I took the 
oath of office. We're getting rid of 16,000 of the 86,000 pages of 
Federal regulations; we may get rid of more. It's not between Government 
and markets. We know there has to be a mix. We know the market can't 
solve all problems, and we know when the Government tries to solve them 
all it only makes it worse.
    The central lesson I have drawn from the experiences of the last 3 
years and from observing what is happening in our country and throughout 
the world is that what works in the world is what works around this 
table, that while we can't go forward with the idea that the Government 
can solve all of our problems, we must not go back to an era where 
people were left to fend for themselves.
    We cannot solve the complex problems of the modern world unless we 
work together in a genuine spirit of community, where everybody does his 
or her part, and where we sharply define what the role of Government is 
and what the role of the Federal, State, and local governments are, what 
the role of the private sector is, what the role of people in their 
family lives is, where we all try to work together to enable people to 
make the most of their own lives and grassroots communities to rise up.
    That is the central lesson that I draw from every experience I have 
had as President. And that is the perspective I bring to the work that 
you have done. We know that one-size-fits-all Government doesn't work. 
We know that the American people are not about to get rid of all 
Government, and they shouldn't. And we do know, I believe, that we can't 
go back to fend-for-yourself, winner-take-all society.
    Our National Government shouldn't try to do everything. There are 
some things that we should do, that we do directly. National defense is 
the best and clearest example, and our military does it better than 
anybody else

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in the world and better than they ever have. We do have, it seems to me, 
when we have national challenges, a responsibility to articulate a clear 
national vision, set goals, challenge people from every walk of life to 
meet the goals, and then do what we can to empower them to succeed.
    In other words, sometimes what we have to do is define the what and 
let others, as much as possible, determine the how. That's what the 
crime bill does. It was clear to me when I became President that there 
was something terribly wrong when the violent crime rate had tripled in 
the last 30 years and the size of our police force had only gone up by 
10 percent.
    It was obvious, if you went to communities all over the country, 
that there were places where the crime rate was going down, and the one 
thing they all had in common was a clear, disciplined, operating 
community policing strategy. So we passed a crime bill that said we're 
going to have a goal of putting 100,000 police on the street. You apply 
for the money, and get it, but we're not telling you who to hire, how to 
train them, how to deploy them, what kind of community groups they have 
to work with. You decide.
    So the Governor of Kentucky and I were in Louisville the other day 
looking at one of the community policing operations there driving the 
crime rate down. I was in Manchester, New Hampshire, looking at one of 
the community policing operations that's driving the crime rate down. 
Every State here has communities where the crime rate is going down. One 
of our major news magazines had a cover story with the commissioner of 
police of New York City talking about the crime rate going down. It 
said, have we found a way to turn the corner on crime? That is the kind 
of partnership we ought to have. I believe Goals 2000 fits that mold. 
The Federal Government's education programs are far less prescriptive 
now than they were in the years I served as the Governor before I came 
here as President.
    Goals 2000 is consistent with the work done by Governor Romer. It 
says that we should have national standards; States should agree to meet 
them; but States and the school districts should decide the ``how''. And 
we should give people resources and help to let them decide how, not the 
Federal Government.
    We have also tried to work with you in particular, as Governor 
Thompson said, with the unfunded mandates law, with the dozens of 
waivers, and with the common efforts we're now making not only to get 
rid of the Boren amendment but to get rid of a lot of other Federal 
requirements that cripple your ability to spend your time and your money 
helping your people to deal with their challenges.
    We have tried to run this smaller Federal Government better, 
stepping up the fight against illegal immigration at the border and in 
the workplace, collecting record amounts of child support, cutting the 
student loan default rate almost in half, doubling the loan volume at 
SBA while we cut the budget by 40 percent, adopting customer service 
standards for every Federal agency. And I'm really proud of the fact 
that one of the major business magazines just last year which gives 
awards every year to corporations in America that serve the public the 
best--in the category for best service over the telephone, competing 
with L.L. Bean, Federal Express, and a lot of other things, the winner 
last year was the Social Security Administration. I'm proud of that. We 
are trying to give the American people a Government that is smaller, 
that costs less, that works better, and that works with you.
    The first thing we need to do now is to finish the work of balancing 
the budget. We all know there's plenty of blame to go around for what 
happened in the years before we started working on this 3 years ago. I 
am proud that the deficit has been cut in half in the last 3 years. It 
is obvious that we need to finish the job. It is also obvious that this 
is a job that will never be finished, at least not in our lifetime, 
because when baby boomers, people my age and younger, begin to move 
toward their retirement years, the demographic changes in America will 
impose great new challenges on the budget, and this work of keeping our 
budget under control will have to be done year-in and year-out for a 
long time to come.
    But we do know that based on the work we have already done, there 
are savings common to both the Republican plan, the plan

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that I have put forward, that amount to about $700 billion, more than 
enough to balance the budget, and enough to meet my criteria of 
protecting the Medicare and Medicaid programs, our investments in 
education and the environment, and providing a modest tax cut.
    We know that there are a lot of policy areas where we do agree, as 
well as some where we don't. I wish, on the whole, that the American 
people could have watched Senator Dole and Speaker Gingrich and Mr. 
Armey and Senator Daschle and Mr. Gephardt and the Vice President, Mr. 
Panetta and I, over these last 50 hours of discussions we've had, 
because we tried to do things the way you try to do them here. And we 
were able to identify significant areas of agreement.
    Whichever Medicare program is passed, for example, it will be a 
program that estimates that we can slow medical inflation in the 
Medicare program below the projected rate of medical inflation in the 
private sector by aggressive incentives to seniors to move to managed 
care. With all the other differences of opinion, that is still there. 
However the final Medicaid program comes out--and I think you have gone 
a long way toward influencing that today in a positive and constructive 
way--we are going to slow the inflation rate in Medicaid well below the 
projected rate of health inflation in the private sector, because of 
giving you greater flexibility to move toward managed care and to do 
other things as well.
    This is encouraging. So I believe the first thing we have to do is 
to finish this job. We cannot in good conscience, even though this is an 
election year, have a work stoppage between now and November. We have to 
go on and finish the work of balancing this budget. Let me say again, I 
was very encouraged by what Senator Dole said today. That is exactly my 
impression of where things are, and I believe we will get an agreement, 
and I look forward to continuing our efforts there.
    I also believe we can get an agreement on Medicaid. You have done a 
lot of work which will help us immensely in that regard. You have always 
said that you could run this program better if you didn't have your 
hands tied and you didn't have to ask Washington's permission every time 
you wanted to do something.
    We have known for a long time that the initial good impulse of 
supporting the Boren amendment was a mistake. We have known for a long 
time that you shouldn't have to ask the Federal Government every time 
you want to change your payment schedule to providers and every time you 
want to put in a new managed care program or make some other change.
    You have come up with a proposal that enables you to have that kind 
of flexibility and still preserves the Nation's ability to guarantee 
medical care for poor children, for pregnant women, for people with 
disabilities, and older Americans. This is a huge step in the right 
direction.
    As you know from our discussion yesterday, I still have some 
concerns. As you have acknowledged, we have to get any proposals scored 
by the Congressional Budget Office, we have to clarify--at least I need 
some clarification on some other issues which we discussed yesterday in 
terms of the definitions of disability and making sure that there will 
be someplace where a clearly enforceable right is held for people with 
regard to the benefits to which they're entitled.
    And there are some other issues that we just didn't discuss because 
we didn't have enough time, like how the people who are now getting 
Medicaid help to pay their Medicare premiums will be able to continue 
that so they don't lose their Medicare coverage. But I am convinced we 
can work these out, and I am very encouraged by the work that you have 
done.
    Let me also say that I think there is one other thing we ought to do 
on health care, and I'd like to ask for your help on that, even though 
it's something that has to be done here in Washington. If we cannot 
follow the other advanced economies of the world and ensure that 
everybody has health insurance, at least we ought to be able to ensure 
that everybody has access to health insurance. There is a bill in the 
Senate now, sponsored by Senator Kassebaum of Kansas and Senator Kennedy 
of Massachusetts, which would simply say that insurance companies cannot 
deny coverage for people because somebody in

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their family has a pre-existing condition. And people can keep their 
insurance if they move from job to job; they can't be cut off.
    The bill would also provide incentives for pooling operations to be 
set up so that more small businesses can buy insurance. I know that 
California and Florida in particular have had some very good results 
with efforts in this area already.
    It is a good bill. It has 43 cosponsors, Republican and Democrat. It 
was voted out of the committee unanimously, and it has not been brought 
to a vote yet because of pressures against it. I think it is quite 
important that that bill be brought to a vote. It is one thing we could 
do, a simple bipartisan act we could take, that would increase the sense 
of security for millions of people in working families who are doing 
everything they can to do the right thing in this country.
    Finally, let me say I applaud the work that you have done, again in 
a bipartisan fashion, on welfare reform. I know you haven't--I don't 
think you've voted on that policy yet, but we discussed it some 
yesterday. I've seen some of the changes you've made. I heard what 
Senator Dole said about child care, agreeing with you and me on that. 
That's a very good sign.
    Let me just be as simple as I can about this: I think the objective 
of welfare reform should be to break the cycle of dependency in a way 
that promotes responsibility, work, and parenthood. I believe that our 
objective for all Americans should be to make sure that every family can 
succeed at home and at work, not to make people choose.
    If a family has an adult that succeeds at work by sacrificing on the 
homefront, our country is weaker because our first and most important 
job, every one of us who has children, is to be good parents. If a 
family can only work at home when they fail at work, then our economy 
will be hurt and all of our efforts to promote independence will be 
undermined.
    So everything I have done in this welfare debate has been designed 
with that in mind. How can we design a system that will be tough on 
responsibility, tough on work requirements, disciplined, but that will 
reward family and childrearing, as well as movement into the workplace?
    And I think if we all keep that in mind, that we want a country 
where people succeed at work and succeed at home, then we'll come to 
answers in common, like the child care answer that the Governors 
recommended. We will do that.
    In terms of the details of running the program and your not having 
to come to us every time you want a waiver, I could not agree more with 
that. I think there have been--a lot of the good ideas that have come 
out of this in the last 3 years, every one of them, as far as I know, 
has come from the States. If you just--look, let me just mention one 
that I have promoted relentlessly since Oregon and a number of other 
States started trying it--but in the areas where there are not enough 
jobs today, how are we going to get jobs for people on welfare? In the 
areas where the markets are tight, how will we give employers an 
incentive to hire people on welfare? One of the things that you can do 
now--but every one of you will be able to do if we pass meaningful 
welfare reform, is to make your own decision to cash out the welfare and 
food stamp benefits and give it in the form of a job supplement to an 
employer to hire somebody to go to work, instead of to stay idle and 
draw that same amount of money.
    There are lots of things like this that can be done. You can do it. 
And I believe we're going to pass welfare reform legislation and I think 
when you take a stand here today saying that we ought to--that the 
Senate bill was a good bill, I thought, and I thought far superior on 
most points to the one that came out of the conference that I vetoed--
but it had some problems and the biggest one for most States was the 
child care problem. You have addressed that here. And you have said, 
okay, be tough on people; make them go to work, but don't ask them to 
hurt their children. That's all any American could ever ask. And I think 
when you do that, you're going to give us a real chance to pass welfare 
reform, and I thank you for that.
    So I would say, again, I think you've had a pretty good meeting 
here. I think you have contributed to the climate that will help us to 
balance the budget. You have contributed immeasurably to helping us to 
resolve the impasse over Medicaid. You have contributed

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to the impulse to move to genuine welfare reform. We can do all these 
things if we do them together. Let me say again, every time this country 
works together, every time we reach across the lines that divide us, we 
never fail. We dissipate cynicism; we dissipate mistrust; we dissipate 
anxiety; we dissipate anger every time we do that.
    Abraham Lincoln said this a long time ago: ``We can succeed only by 
concert. It is not `Can any of us imagine better,' but `Can we all do 
better.' '' The Governors always attempt to answer that question with a 
resounding ``yes.''
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:25 a.m. at the J.W. Marriot Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to Gov. John Engler of Michigan; Gov. George 
Voinovich of Ohio; Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa; Gov. Paul Patton of 
Kentucky, and Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado.