[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 14 (Monday, April 7, 1997)]
[Pages 461-466]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Women's Economic Leadership Forum

April 4, 1997

    Welcome to Humility 101. Thank you, Betsy, Maria, Linda. Thank you, 
Senator Landrieu, all of you. I'm delighted that you're here for this 
first ever Women's Economic Leadership Summit. Linda, I want to 
especially thank you and the Center for Policy Alternatives for your 
role in this meeting.
    I couldn't help thinking, when Betsy was introducing me, that I--of 
all the things that I have done to try to elevate the status, the 
visibility, and the success of women, the most difficult one for me to 
do was just this week when I permitted Secretary Albright to represent 
me in throwing out the first ball--[laughter]--of the baseball season. 
It was very difficult. But you see, she got a lot more publicity for it 
than I would have. [Laughter]
    She throws hard, straight, and low when necessary--[laughter]--
that's good.
    I'm delighted to see all of you here. When I came into office, one 
of the things that I wanted most to do was not only to fashion a new 
economic policy for our country that would move the economy forward but 
to do it in a way that would address two problems that I saw really 
eating away at the heart of America: one, the fact that all Americans 
didn't have a chance to participate in our economy, even when it was 
doing well, and I wanted to change that; and second, the fact that more 
and more Americans were having genuine difficulty fulfilling their 
responsibilities to their children and their responsibilities at work, 
principally lower income working people but not exclusively lower income 
working people, a lot of others as well.
    So we attempted not only to have a big economic strategy on the big 
issues, focusing on cutting the deficit, eventually balancing the 
budget, continuing to invest in education and technology and research, 
expanding trade--all of those things that I think are so important--but 
also to specifically target people and places that had been left out of 
the economic mainstream with initiatives like the empowerment zones, the 
community development financial institutions initiative, the 
microenterprise initiative, which I imagine Hillary will talk a little 
bit about when she comes over in a few minutes. But also with a lot of 
initiatives specifically directed toward women, the things that we've 
done in the Small Business Administration, increasing by 300 percent the 
number of loans to women from the SBA, and a number of other things. And 
of course we have done a lot in the area of work and family.
    And I think the results have been, conservatively speaking, pretty 
impressive. Just this morning the new unemployment figures were 
announced. Unemployment dropped to 5.2 percent. I now think we have 
persuaded most economists that we could actually have 5 percent or lower 
unemployment in this country without having inflation if we do it with 
discipline. I'm going to do everything I can to get a balanced budget 
agreement this year so that it will send a signal to the markets that 
they can keep interest rates modest, we can keep the markets strong, and 
we can keep creating jobs and bring more and more people into the work 
force.
    Because, keep in mind, this 5.2 percent unemployment rate is 
misleading. There are lots and lots of States that have unemployment 
rates at 4 percent or less now. There are huge numbers of areas in 
States that have unemployment rates of 4.5, 4 percent, or less, and then 
there are places that have unemployment rates of 10 percent or more. So 
it's very important that we keep this effort going. It's also very 
important on the ques

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tion of whether we can move the number of people from welfare to work 
that are prescribed in the welfare reform bill, and I'll say a little 
more about that in a minute.
    But the point I want to make to you is, number one, it's very 
important to do the big things right. And we have to continue to do 
that. If the overall economy is doing well because more and more women 
are well educated and well versed in business and because there are more 
and more groups out there trying to support each other and bring people 
into the economic mainstream, a lot of good things will happen if 
nothing else is done. So it's important to do the big things right.
    But secondly, it's also important to have specific, targeted 
initiatives that open up economy opportunity for everybody. The average 
pay of women is still only 71 cents on the dollar of what men make; for 
minority women it's about 60 cents. It's still more difficult on the 
whole for women to start a business. It's still more difficult on the 
whole for women to rise above certain levels in corporations. And we 
can't stop until we have this whole thing done. That's really the thing 
I want you to focus on today.
    And what I'd like to do is just to summarize very quickly some of 
the things that we've tried to do that directly or indirectly bear on 
this, the major initiatives outstanding that we're trying to implement 
in this Congress, and then again say that I hope that one of the things 
that will come out of the summit is that you will give us some more 
ideas about the road from here and where we go.
    If you look at the world we are living in and the one we are certain 
to live in for the next few decades, it will be a world in which the 
flexibility of all human potential in a country will determine its 
capacity for success--the ability to learn, the ability to work, the 
ability to change, and the ability to reconcile competing obligations. 
The biggest competing obligation for any great society as a whole is, 
how do you balance the need to be highly competitive with the need to 
adequately reward work and provide a decent amount of security, without 
which people feel so disoriented it's hard for them to be productive? 
How do you strike the right balance, that requires us to forge a whole 
new synthesis in economic policy and to break out of old ways of 
thinking?
    At a very personal level, we have to do the same thing with work and 
family. How do you enable people to succeed in the work place, to find 
personal fulfillment, whether it's in a for-profit or a not-for-profit 
or a public environment? How do you get the maximum number of able-
bodied people in the work force and never forget that any society's most 
important task is raising good children who are successful and wholesome 
and happy and able to grow into successful people?
    And so when we look at the future, we have to analyze every issue in 
terms of those two things. So that, if you take, for example, the 
struggle that I've waged here for the last 4 years to get people to 
accept, respect, and indeed rejoice in the fact that we are becoming an 
evermore multiracial, multiethnic society--that also, parenthetically, 
is necessary if we're going to reconcile these economic issues properly 
and if we're going to reconcile work and family properly, because we're 
not going to be able to raise successful children unless they fell 
comfortable not only with their own heritage but in respecting and 
dealing with people of different heritages. So this is very, very 
important.
    I'd just like to start with that, because it's very important that, 
you know, when anybody brings something to me, and they say, ``Mr. 
President, we ought to do this,'' or ``We shouldn't do that,'' or ``We 
should try to stop the other thing,'' I try to see it through that 
framework. And I try to ask myself more and more, how will this affect 
America when our daughter is my age? What will this country look like in 
30 years? How will we maintain the American dream? How will we maintain 
a sense of one America with genuine respect for our differences? How 
will we maintain the leadership of this country?
    Just this morning I had a wonderful event with a number of leading 
Republicans and Democrats who have worked in arms control for years, 
endorsing the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which, by 
the way, is a very big thing not only in terms of national security but 
in terms of our economic well being that we do this. But the most 
important thing to me is it will help

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to provide the right balance between change and security for the 
American people 30 years from now if we do it. And if we don't, we'll 
pay a terrible price for it. And I think every one of you--we all need a 
kind of a framework for the future that we think about.
    I'll just say this one other example. I had a very successful summit 
meeting in Helsinki with President Yeltsin. But the only way it 
succeeded was that he was able--not just me, but he was able to think 
about a future that is very different from the immediate past and not to 
be imprisoned by the categories of the past but to think about, you 
know, what do I want Russia to look like in 30 years? What do I want the 
men and women coming of age in Russia to be like? What kind of life do I 
want them to live? How should they relate to the United States and to 
the rest of Europe? And this sort of courageous thinking is really 
required of all of us. And we may have to give up some things we'd just 
as soon not give up in the short run, but we're going to be able to 
embrace a much richer future if we do it.
    Now, to come back to the subject of the meeting, it seems to me that 
we have to stay with the proposition that in the near term, that small 
business will be the most powerful engine of opportunity for the largest 
number of women who are trying to move into the economic mainstream, 
either as employees or owners. When I became President--I think this is 
right--I believe that woman-owned businesses contributed about $1.6 
trillion to our gross national product. It's up to $2.3 trillion now. 
One in five employees in the country are working for a business owned by 
a woman. That's a stunning statistic.
    It also means that we have to do more to try to help women have 
access to the credit markets, to move in, to succeed. And we have tried 
to do that with the SBA and with other things. But secondly, it means 
that we have to be sensitive to the fact that if more women work in 
small businesses, they will be more vulnerable unless we have other 
mechanisms to enable them to succeed. That's one of the big reasons I 
thought it was important to raise the minimum wage. It's one of the big 
reasons that one of the most important provisions of the 1993 deficit 
reduction act in our economic plan was a huge expansion in the earned-
income tax credit for working families. So it's a very good thing to do.
    By the way, what that means is now that all families with two 
children with incomes of under $30,000 a year are now paying markedly 
lower taxes than they would have been paying if that bill hadn't passed. 
So it has made a difference. It's one of the reasons that I was proud 
that the Family and Medical Leave Act was the first bill I signed. We 
have millions of people who have now taken advantage of that, and we 
know that it has not hurt our economy. And again I will say, I know that 
it is somewhat inconvenient for some businesses on occasion, even though 
the surveys show that way over 80 percent of the businesses say there's 
been literally no cost. But in the end it has to increase the 
productivity of a society when people feel that they can do a good job 
at work and they're not worried sick at work about either their 
children, their parents, their spouses, or someone else because they 
can't even have a basic amount of time with them when they need it. So 
these are things it seems to me we need to focus on in the future.
    We changed the pension laws in the last couple of years in ways that 
I think are very important, especially to a lot of women workers who 
have been employed by companies that were vulnerable. When I became 
President, they told me that the pension system of the country was going 
to be the next S&L crisis. And the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation 
was in terrible trouble and had been in debt for 16 years. Well, now 
it's running a surplus for the first time in over 20 years, and over 40 
million workers have had their pensions secured. We made it easier for 
millions and millions of people to take out 401(k) plans and to keep 
them when they move from job to job and made nonprofits eligible for 
401(k) plans, hospitals, educational institutions, other health care 
institutions. This affects 4 million women.
    And we now know that while we have to be determined to preserve the 
stability and the integrity of the Social Security system, it is really 
not adequate to maintain the lifestyle of people when they get in their 
retirement years. We have to have higher savings rates for people in the 
work force. And since

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more and more retirement plans that are funded by employers are going to 
define contribution plans instead of define benefit plans, it is 
absolutely essential that we continue to move forward with both the 
integrity and the accessibility of savings plans for retirements for 
women in the work force. And we have some more things that we will 
propose to the Congress this year to try to strengthen the integrity as 
well as the accessibility of retirement. I think it is very, very 
significant.
    In addition to that, we have tried to improve, as Betsy said, the 
operation of the Federal child care programs and how they interface with 
those at the local level. And in the welfare reform bill, one of the 
best things about it was we put up $4 billion more for child care. But 
let me say, I still believe in some ways that's the most underfunded 
employee support program in the United States. And I urge you to take a 
look at that--about the delivery system and how it works.
    One of the things that I think should be done intensely in every 
State--and I'm going around to State legislators, along with the Vice 
President and the First Lady, to talk to them about education reform and 
welfare reform, and one of the things that I think every State should do 
is to target the establishment of child care centers and the training of 
child care workers for moving people from welfare to work and then 
giving people on welfare who do become certified child care workers 
either free or discounted service for their own children in the child 
care centers where their parents work.
    If you look at it, we have a window here of significant opportunity, 
because the States got a block grant under the welfare reform bill, 
targeted to how much they were getting when the welfare rolls were at 
their highest. The welfare rolls have now dropped by about 2.5 million, 
the biggest drop in history. So they have some extra money here until 
the next economic recession comes along.
    And I believe that one of the most significant things that can be 
done--and I urge all of you to ask your States to consider doing this 
and to lobby at the State level to do this--is to focus very sharply on 
the opportunity this welfare reform bill plus this extra cash the States 
gives up to set up for the first time a genuinely comprehensive, well 
trained, well staffed, properly funded child care network in the country 
in a way that will move people from welfare to work and make child care 
available to lower wage working people who have never been on welfare in 
their lives but can't afford decent child care for their kids. It's a 
terrific opportunity, and we should be doing it.
    Let me also say that we've done a lot of other things here that 
only--at least indirectly impact the economy, but have a huge impact on 
women: the Violence Against Women's Office, which I think has done a 
great job in the Justice Department, the Women's Health Office, the 
White House Women's Office that Betsy heads, the White House Interagency 
Committee on Women's Business Enterprise. We have dramatically increased 
medical research in areas that disproportionately affect women and 
involve women in testing protocols in a way they were not involved 
before I became President, which dramatically compromised the medical 
research effort of the country in terms of how it affected women. And I 
think that has been changed substantially, and I'm very proud of that.
    Now, there is still a lot to do, and let me just mention some of the 
things that are my priorities. First of all, in the health care area. 
While the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill did a good thing saying that you 
couldn't be denied health insurance if someone in your family got sick 
or when you change jobs, it's only good if you can still afford to buy 
your health insurance. And we know there are 10 million children who 
still aren't insured and that a huge percentage of them aren't insured 
because their parents lose their insurance when they lose their jobs or 
when they're between jobs.
    We have a proposal on the table which we think, with the money we 
now have available, will cut that number to 5 million. There are other 
proposals which have been offered in this Congress by both Republicans 
and Democrats alike. I would just urge you to do whatever you can and 
say whatever you can to whomever you can to tell us to do the best we 
can. I mean, we do have a sense that--I think a sense--there's a 
majority I think in the Congress now committed to

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doing as much as we can on this. And if we could get the kids of this 
country insured, it wouldn't be long before we'd figure out how to fill 
the rest of the gaps. That's what I believe. And so I hope that we can 
make progress there.
    With regard to welfare reform, the problems that I see in the bill 
are as follows. Number one, the biggest problem has nothing to do with 
welfare reform, and that is that they cut aid to legal immigrants too 
much. And I'm not talking about people who come here and don't tell the 
truth when they come to America and immediately try to get on welfare. 
I'm talking about people who work, pay taxes, have children. Many of 
them are women and, through no fault of their own, get sick, are victims 
of crime, have accidents, and now won't be able to claim any access to 
Medicaid or any other public benefits. Our budget corrects that, and I 
hope you will support that.
    Furthermore, and right on point here, I believe that women 
businessowners are more likely than men businessowners to be sensitive 
to the extra effort that will have to be made to move people from 
welfare to work. But we know that most of these jobs are going to have 
to come from the private sector.
    Now, let me just describe to you what the dimension of the problem 
is in welfare reform. In the last 4 years, our economy produced 11.5 
million jobs. We had never done that before. That's the most we ever 
produced. In that 11.5 million jobs, there were one million people who 
moved from welfare to work. Of that one million people who moved from 
welfare to work, my Council of Economic Advisers estimates that about 
half of them moved from welfare to work because the economy got better 
and if nobody had lifted a finger, they would have moved from welfare to 
work because people don't like to be on welfare. They want to go to work 
if they can.
    The other half of the other half, most them moved from welfare to 
work because of special efforts that had already been made in the States 
and localities under welfare reform initiatives that were already 
underway. Some of them moved off the welfare rolls because we had a 50 
percent increase in child support collections in 4 years, something that 
I'm very proud of. And we have provisions to do better even, and we're 
going to do better.
    But here's the rub: under this new law, 40 percent of those who are 
able-bodied and able-minded enough to be in the work force have to move 
from welfare to work some time in the next 4 years. And to cut to the 
chase, that's about 900,000 more. But that's 900,000 more that have to 
move from welfare to work whether we can produce 11.5 million jobs for 
another 4 years or not. If we did it back to back, it would be 
wonderful, and we might. But if we do, we will sure enough set some 
records. It has not ever been done before.
    That means two things: One, we should give some extra help to 
communities with high unemployment to hire people to do community 
service related jobs, and there's something in our budget for that; but 
second, most of these jobs are going to have to come from the private 
sector and from welfare reform efforts. And there are--in my budget, 
there is a special credit which you can get only if you can demonstrate, 
A, that you've hired someone from welfare to work and, B, that they got 
a new job; they didn't replace someone else. But the credit is 
substantial. It's 50 percent of the salary up to $10,000 a year. So that 
is, in effect, an education and training supplement because we know that 
some of these folks who have never had work experience are going to be 
hard to place.
    In addition to that, every State can--and I've been going around 
challenging them to do, and several are starting--can give the welfare 
check to an employer as an education and training supplement. In Kansas 
City, if you pay $1.75 over the minimum wage, they'll give you the 
welfare check. Kansas City will give it to you for up to 4 years. But 
most States would be more like a year.
    But the point is, even if as a private employer, you couldn't hire 
someone for more than the length of the subsidy, if you hired somebody 
for a year, they'd have something on a resume. It would be that much 
easier to get another job. That would be 1 year on their 5 year lifetime 
limit on welfare that wouldn't be used up. So it would be worth doing 
even if it could just be done for a year.

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    And the women businessowners of America can have a huge impact in 
doing something that, by the way, will also help the economy if you 
create that many more consumers, bring that many more people into the 
work force, have that many more people being productive, that many more 
people being a positive role model for their own children. This is a 
huge thing. So I hope that you will, all of you, do what you can to try 
to mobilize the women business people of America to try to take an 
active and aggressive role in this effort.
    I have asked the Congress to pass what I think is a good flextime 
bill to give people more options to take their overtime in time or 
money. But I think the important thing is that the employee ought to 
have the choice. It shouldn't be a way around the 40 hour work week. 
[Applause] Thank you.
    I have asked the Congress--I think--I've asked the Congress to 
expand family and medical leave in a very narrow way just to give some 
time off to go to children's conferences at school and to take their 
children or their parents to regular doctor's appointments in a very 
limited fashion. I hope that will pass and find favor. And as I said, 
we've also proposed some other things in the retirement security area.
    The last thing I would say is, I think that there are a lot of women 
who are outside their regular school years who deserve a second chance, 
who could make a major contribution to the economic life of this 
country. And the education proposals that are on the table in this 
Congress would be really helpful. If we pass the $1,500 a year tax 
credit for the first 2 years of college, it would in effect make 
community college education as universal as high school is today.
    I also proposed a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost 
of any high school--any tuition after high school, easier access to an 
IRA that you could withdraw from tax-free to pay for education, and the 
biggest increase in Pell grants in 20 years.
    But I think these things are important. We need to remind ourselves 
that the average age of people in our educational institutions is going 
higher and higher and higher. Even in the 4 year colleges now, it's up 
to 25--26 in some of our 4 year colleges in America. Most of our 
community colleges, it's higher than that. And so having universal 
access so people can get a second chance, I think, is profoundly 
important. And I hope that you will support that. It's a big deal for 
our economy and a big deal for women's economic opportunity.

    So these are the things that we're going to be pushing. If you have 
other ideas I hope you will do that and give them to us.

    And the last thing I want to say is I hope you will continue to 
participate as partners with us. I went to a memorial service yesterday 
over at the Commerce Department for Ron Brown and the other people who 
were killed a year ago in Croatia. And I think one of the more important 
things that Secretary Brown did was to make sure that he emphasized 
women business leaders in these trade missions and reaching out to the 
rest of the world and trying to build ties. So I hope you will look for 
other opportunities to participate in that way and to continue to be a 
part of the partnership that we're trying to establish with America to 
create the kind of country we want for the 21st century.
    Thank you very much. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:41 p.m. in the Indian Treaty Room at the 
White House. In his remarks, he referred to Betsy Myers, Deputy 
Assistant to the President for Women's Initiatives and Outreach, and 
Maria Echaveste, Assistant to the President and Director of Public 
Liaison, White House; and Linda Tarr-Whelan, president and chief 
executive officer, Center for Policy Alternatives.