[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 19 (Monday, May 12, 1997)]
[Pages 644-648]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
The President's Radio Address and an Exchange With Reporters

May 3, 1997

    The President. Good morning. Yesterday we took a dramatic step to 
prepare America for the 21st century, and we got the best evidence yet 
that the new economic policy we adopted in 1993 is working for our 
people. Yesterday morning, we learned the unemployment rate has dropped 
to 4.9 percent, the lowest in 24 years. And yesterday afternoon, I 
reached an historic agreement with the leaders of Congress to balance 
the budget by 2002, with a plan that ensures we will balance the budget, 
invest in our future, protect our values and our obligations to our 
children, our parents, and those in need.
    Four years ago, when I took office, the economy was stagnating, job 
growth was sluggish, the budget deficit threatened to drown our economy. 
I believed it was time to change course with a new economic strategy: 
Invest and grow, cut the budget deficit, sell more products overseas 
through tough trade agreements, and invest in the skills of our people. 
In 1993, we put our economic plan in place. It wasn't easy; it required 
hard

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choices. But now, the deficit has been cut for 4 years in a row, falling 
from $290 billion in 1992 to about $80 billion this year--more than two-
thirds of the way home to our first balanced budget since the 1960's. 
All this has spurred lower interest rates, more investment, and stronger 
growth.
    And the good news goes beyond low unemployment: Economic growth is 
at its highest in a decade; core inflation at its lowest in three 
decades; the largest decline in income inequality since the 1960's; and 
thanks to the hard work of the American people, 12 million new jobs. It 
is now clear that our economy is the strongest it's been in a 
generation.
    Now we have to keep this economic growth going. We have a great 
opportunity to build a world for our children better than any America 
has ever known. But my fellow Americans, we must prepare. We have to 
give Americans the education and skills they need to compete in the 
global economy. We have to invest in science and technology. We have to 
continue to get and keep our economic house in order.
    To keep our economy growing, we must stay on the path of fiscal 
responsibility. To make sure all our people can share in this 
prosperity, we must make sure that a balanced budget also invests in 
their future. Balancing the budget, investing in our people: we must do 
both these things. In 1993, many people doubted that it could be done. 
We have shown that it can be done. And with this budget agreement, a 
bipartisan budget agreement, we will prove that we can actually balance 
the budget and continue to invest in our future.
    It took weeks of intense negotiations to lead to an agreement that 
protects our values. A balanced budget with unbalanced values and 
priorities would not have been enough. There were times when it seemed 
that we, perhaps, would never reach this agreement, times when it 
appeared that we could not secure a balanced budget true to the 
principles and priorities essential to our future and bringing Democrats 
and Republicans together across all their differences. But everyone 
understood that the stakes were too great and the cost of failure too 
severe to give up.
    So, yesterday, we reached an agreement on just such a plan. It is a 
significant breakthrough for our country. And it proves that our 
political system can work when we put our partisan differences aside and 
put the American people and their future first.
    This budget honors our duty to our parents and to those in need by 
securing Medicare and Medicaid and extending the life of the Medicare 
Trust Fund for a full decade. It honors our duty to our children, 
expanding health coverage to children who don't have it, up to 5 million 
more of them. It keeps my pledge to continue the job of welfare reform 
by providing tax incentives to businesses to move people from welfare to 
work and restoring some of the unwise and excessive cuts included in 
last year's welfare bill. It cleans up 500 toxic waste dumps and 
strengthens enforcement for a clean environment. It gives the American 
people tax relief for education, for help in raising their children, and 
to spur investment in our future.
    And perhaps most important of all, this bipartisan agreement 
reflects our commitment to make education America's top priority on the 
edge of a new century. Here are our goals: every 8-year-old can read, 
every 12-year-old can log on to the Internet, every 18-year-old can go 
on to college, every adult can keep on learning for a lifetime.
    This balanced budget is a breakthrough toward those goals. It's the 
best education budget in three decades. It will give families tax cuts 
to pay for college, and it will include our HOPE scholarship, a tax 
credit for tuition for the first 2 years of college to make those first 
2 years as universal as a high school diploma is today. The budget also 
includes the biggest increase in Pell grant scholarships for deserving 
students in 30 years. It funds our America Reads challenge, which will 
mobilize a million volunteer reading tutors to make sure that all our 8-
year-olds will be able to read independently. It will help to connect 
all our classrooms and libraries to the information superhighway. And it 
will support our move to develop genuine national standards in education 
and, by 1999, to test every fourth grader in reading and every eighth 
grader in math to make sure we can compete in the world of tomorrow.

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    This balanced budget plan is in balance with our values. It will 
help to prepare our people for a new century. It will help to propel our 
country into that century stronger than ever. I urge Members of Congress 
in both parties to pass it.
    Yesterday morning, I had a chance to think about our country, its 
history, and its destiny, when I was privileged to join in the 
dedication of the new memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt here in 
Washington. It is a tribute to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt, and to the 
generation that changed America, conquering depression at home, 
defeating tyranny abroad. We've come a long way since then, and we can 
go much, much further if we work with the same faith, commitment, and 
confidence that FDR's generation showed as they met the challenges of 
their time.
    In words from his last speech, which he wrote shortly before he 
died, President Roosevelt said, ``The only limit to our realization of 
tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong 
and active faith.''
    My fellow Americans, the news on the economy, the balanced budget 
agreement, they should give us confidence; they should validate our 
faith; they should erase our doubts. Let us now reach across party lines 
and seize our chance to balance the budget and maintain that strong and 
active faith that will ensure that our best days as a nation lie still 
before us.
    Thanks for listening.

[At this point, the radio address ended, and the President took 
questions from reporters.]

President's Visit to Mexico

    Q. [Inaudible]--with our requests on drug enforcement, their 
policies with immigration and trade, as you know. And some are 
characterizing your trip as kind of a visit of reconciliation. How would 
you characterize it, and how is the cooperation, specifically on drugs?
    The President. First of all, I don't see it as a visit of 
reconciliation. I see it as building on an ongoing partnership between 
two great nations that share a huge border and a common future, have 
some common problems, and inevitably some disagreements. We should look 
at this as a regular part of our building a common future. We will have 
some disagreements, but we've got an awful lot in common. But I think 
that the people of Mexico and the Government of Mexico know that the 
United States and that our administration wish them well and want to 
help them build a better future.
    We also know we have some common problems. This drug problem is as 
big or bigger a problem for Mexico as it is for the United States. They 
will, in the end, not be able to maintain the fabric of an orderly, 
democratic, free society if the narcotraffickers come to dominate huge 
sections of their country. On the other hand, we have to understand the 
pressures that they are under, and we have to help them to beat back 
those pressures. And we'll work through it as well as we can.
    On immigration, we will continue to have some tensions because what 
we have done as a country is to have a very broadminded view of legal 
immigration. I would remind you--all those that think that we somehow 
have a narrowminded view--we let in almost a million people legally into 
this country last year. But if we're going to have a broad attitude 
toward legal immigration, we have to increase our intolerance for 
illegal immigration. We can--if we have laws and people wait in line, 
sometimes for years, to come to this country, it is wrong not to try to 
be tough to stop those who seek to evade those laws and come in ahead of 
their ordinary time. That's not right. So we'll work through that. I 
think our policy is right, and I think it will be a productive trip.
    Q. Mr. President, what's your reaction to the British election?

Budget Agreement

    Q. It seems that the budget deals hinge on this $225 billion 
windfall from the new economic forecast. What if that doesn't pan out? 
What does that do to you?
    The President. Well, first of all, let me remind you that--and I 
want to compliment both sides here--we have known for some time that--
even before the last figures came in--that economic growth was at 5.6 
percent in the last quarter, which is extraordinary, and that--then 
these new unemployment figures. We have known that the economy

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was performing well enough that our outlays would be lower, because more 
people would--fewer people would depend on Government assistance, and 
our revenues would be higher. The CBO's preliminary estimates--they 
don't file their final report until August--was that over a 5-year 
period, that might generate about $226 billion in new revenues.
    There were some problems in this budget; there still are some 
discipline problems in this budget. Keep in mind, we're still going to 
have to downsize the central Government. We're still going to have a lot 
of agencies that will grow at less than the rate of inflation. We are 
concentrating our new money in education, in science and technology and 
research, in environmental cleanup, in things that will build our 
future.
    But what I want to compliment the budget negotiators on is, they 
didn't try to spend that money. They only spent about 11\1/2\ percent of 
the money that we're now pretty sure will come in. All the rest of the 
money will go to reducing the deficit. So, if they're wrong, even quite 
a bit wrong, this budget will still balance in 2002 because they spent 
just a little over 10 percent of the money. If they're right, it will 
balance before 2002 because of the work and the growth and the 
productivity of the American people.
    So the real story here is not that they've spent $26 billion to stop 
what could have been a terrible problem in the Medicaid program for 
States with high disability costs or large numbers of poor people and 
poor children especially; or that they want to invest a little more 
money in infrastructure, which is good for our long-term economic 
growth; or that we're going to alleviate some of the extreme cuts in the 
food stamp program last year--that's not the real story. The real story 
is, they looked at this pot of money that appeared before them and said, 
``We're going to leave nearly 90 percent of it there for deficit 
reduction and try to balance the budget even quicker.'' And to me, that 
is the real story. And they deserve a lot of credit for that.
    And that's the way I look at this. Yes, we took a little of the 
money. It gets us a few more votes for the plan. But it's also good 
things to do. We also put a little money back into the last year of 
defense, especially in the authorizing funds, simply so we could plan, 
because the Defense Department has to be able to plan long-term for the 
continuing restructuring of the military but increase reliance again on 
research, development, new technologies, and new weapons.
    So that small amount of a big pie shows, in fact, that we probably 
will balance the budget even sooner. But we don't intend to spend money 
that hasn't been realized yet.

Elections in the United Kingdom

    Q. Mr. President, what's your reaction to the British election?
    The President. Well, I think it's obviously a big vote for change. I 
think it's a validation of the themes that Mr. Blair struck. I think it 
once again proves that the people do not want political parties and 
political leadership tied to the rhetoric of the past. If you go back to 
the section of President Roosevelt's speech to the Commonwealth Club 
that I quoted--in 1932--yesterday, he said that if you have new times, 
you have to have new policies. You don't have new values, but you do 
have new directions. And so I thought it was a case where the people 
made that decision.
    I must also tell you though that this is my first chance to comment 
on this, and I'm looking forward to serving with Prime Minister Blair. 
He's a very exciting man, a very able man. I like him very much. But I 
also think that the people of the United States and the people of Great 
Britain should know that John Major represented that nation very well in 
the world. I have obviously no experience and no judgment about what 
happened domestically, because I wasn't there and I'm not a British 
citizen, but in all of our dealings over these last 4 years and several 
months, I was profoundly impressed by his patriotism, by his willingness 
to take tough decisions, especially in Bosnia where they were with us 
all the way. And so the British people can be proud of this stewardship.
    And the Conservatives had a good, long run. Nothing lasts forever, 
and they were in for a very long time. But I hope that Prime Minister 
Major and I hope the British people will always feel a great deal of 
pride in what they did in the way they related to the rest

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of the world in his stewardship because I was very impressed by it. And 
I also was impressed by the fact that he had the courage to start the 
peace process in Northern Ireland. And I hope and pray, now that the 
British election is over, that Prime Minister Blair will take up the 
torch, that the IRA will declare a cease-fire, and that we can get back 
on the road to resolving that problem. It is high time, and I can tell 
you, that's what the people of Northern Ireland want.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:06 a.m. from the Oval Office at the 
White House.