[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 21 (Monday, May 26, 1997)]
[Pages 738-741]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Democratic Business Council and Women's Leadership Forum 
Dinner

May 19, 1997

    Thank you. Please be seated. Thank you, Tom, and thank you, Cynthia, 
for your wonderful work. And I want to thank Steve Grossman and Alan 
Solomont and all the folks at the DNC for what they have done. I thank 
Secretary Babbitt and Ambassador Babbitt for coming tonight. And mostly, 
I want to thank you for being a part of these two very important 
components of our party's effort to take our country in to a new 
century.
    As you might imagine, I'm feeling pretty good about things right 
now. I'm very happy about the budget agreement, very happy for our 
country. But I think it's worth pointing out that where we are today is 
a function of the work of tens of millions of Americans, in their own 
lives, making the most of those lives, and also a direct function of the 
changes that we brought to Washington 4\1/2\ years ago.
    I was convinced in 1992 when I sought the Presidency, that we had to 
change the economic policy of the country if we wanted to build a 
structure of opportunity that would keep the American dream alive for 
all Americans. I was convinced that we would have to change the social 
policy of the country if we wanted to have an American community that 
really worked instead of being divided by race and region and religion 
and paralyzed by crime. And I was convinced we would have to change the 
role of Government and

[[Page 739]]

that we needed a very expansive view of what our responsibilities in the 
world are.
    And in so many ways, the conditions we enjoy in America today are 
the direct result of our country moving forward in all three of those 
areas. And I'd just like to say that we changed the economic policy to 
go from running deficits as far as the eye could see to bringing down 
the deficit but continuing to invest more in education, research, 
development, technology, science, while we were cutting back on the rest 
of Government and expanding trade throughout the world. And a lot of 
people said it wouldn't work.
    But 4 years later, the deficit has been reduced. Before this 
balanced budget package is ever voted on, we will have a deficit that is 
77 percent lower than it was the day I took office. And I'm proud of 
that, and you should be, too.
    And our economy produced a record 12 million new jobs in the last 4 
years. The unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in 24 years, the 
inflation rate the lowest in 30 years, the business investment rate the 
highest in 35 years. I'm proud of those things. I'm also proud as a 
Democrat that income inequality last year dropped by the largest amount 
since the 1960's, so that more and more ordinary Americans are beginning 
to participate in the benefits of a growing economy. And that is 
important, because we've had 20 years in which, because of competitive 
problems and a lot of other things, inequality among working people has 
increased in times where the economy is expanding and shrinking.
    So these things are important, and we should feel good about them. I 
am proud of the fact that crime has gone down for 5 years in a row for 
the first time in about a quarter of a century, that we had the biggest 
drop in welfare rolls, before the welfare reform bill passed, in 50 
years--50 years. And I'm proud of that. And you should be proud of that.
    I'm proud of the fact that the world has moved closer toward peace 
and freedom than it was 4 years ago, in spirit of all the problems we 
have. And in the last 4 months and a couple of weeks, since the 
Inauguration, we can take some genuine pride in what has happened. In 
terms of creating opportunity, we negotiated a telecommunications 
agreement with the rest of the world which will open up 90 percent of 
the world's markets to American sellers and producers of 
telecommunications services and equipment. It will create hundreds of 
thousands of high-wage jobs in America over the next few years.
    This balanced budget agreement will keep the deficit coming down; it 
will keep interest rates down; it will lengthen the economic recovery. 
It also contains almost everything that I advocated in the campaign of 
1996. You heard Cynthia say that it has the biggest increase in 
educational investment in a generation. It also has the biggest 
expansion of aid for people to go to colleges since 1945, since the GI 
bill came in. It has the biggest increase in Pell grant scholarships for 
poor students in 20 years and will provide tax deductions and tax 
credits to make the first 2 years of college as universal as a high 
school diploma is today and to put college within reach of all 
Americans. I think that is very important, and I hope you do, too.
    With the Secretary of the Interior here, I can't help noting that it 
also has a very strong environmental budget. It protects our parks and 
enables us to continue our historic work of rescuing the Florida 
Everglades from destruction and will enable us to clean up 500 toxic 
waste dumps, the most dangerous ones in this country, in the next 4 
years.
    The plan will extend--[applause]. That's worth clapping for. The 
plan will extend health coverage to half of the 10 million children in 
America who don't have any health insurance. And these are in working 
families; these children are in working families.
    The plan will restore, as I pledged to do in 1996, a lot of unfair 
cuts in assistance to legal immigrants and their children who come here 
lawfully and have misfortunes visit them. It will also provide funds to 
help cities in our high unemployment areas hire people who run out of 
their welfare benefits and have to go to work. And it will provide tax 
incentives for businesses to hire people from welfare to work.
    So it is a good budget. There are tax provisions in this budget. The 
budget will contain some form of capital gains tax, some form of estate 
tax relief, the entire education tax package I generally described to 
you, and

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some tax relief for families with children, minor children in the home, 
to help them deal with their child care and other costs. But the cost of 
this package is sharply circumscribed, and by agreement with the leaders 
of the Congress, it will--to give you some idea of it, in today's 
dollars it will only be about one-tenth as costly as the huge tax cut 
that was passed in 1981.
    So don't let anybody tell you that we have agreed to blow a big hole 
in the deficit. We have not done so, and we will not do so. And I will 
not permit such a bill to become law. The bill we agreed to is a good-
faith compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats, but it validates 
the economic direction this administration took. And it would not have 
been possible--none of this would have been possible if we hadn't passed 
the economic package back in 1993, with only Members of our party 
supporting it and with no votes to spare--the Vice President broke the 
tie in the Senate, and as he says, ``Whenever I vote, we win.'' 
[Laughter]
    So this is a happy day. This budget is good for America. The 
telecommunications agreement is good for America. We're moving forward 
economically. We're also moving forward to try to come together more. 
I'm trying to pass a juvenile justice bill in the Congress which will 
give communities the resources and the help they need to try to restore 
civility and calm and order to the lives of our young people.
    In most of America, while crime is going down precipitously, the 
crime rate among people under 18 is continuing to rise, leveling off 
only last year. But in some places in America, it's a different story. 
In Boston, Massachusetts, there has not been a single child killed with 
a gun in 18 months, not a single child. In Houston, Texas, where the 
mayor opened an inner-city soccer program and an inner-city golf 
program--pre-Tiger Woods--[laughter]--he had 3,000 kids in the soccer 
program, 2,500 kids in the golf program, and the crime rate among 
juveniles went down.
    So I'm doing my best to pass a juvenile justice bill that will 
follow up with what the crime bill did in 1994 and keep the crime rate 
coming down. Tomorrow I'll have an important announcement on welfare 
reform, to try to move more people from welfare to work. There is a lot 
to do out there, but we are moving in the right direction, and you 
should feel good about your country.
    On the world front, we've ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, 
which will make every community in America safer from terrorism and 
crime in the future, from poison gas. We have reached an agreement 
between NATO and Russia that will have a partnership instead of enmity 
between NATO and Russia. And we will, in July, expand NATO for the first 
time. We are moving toward a more peaceful, more stable, more democratic 
world.
    I just got back from a very successful trip to Mexico and Central 
America and the Caribbean, and I just have to tell you that I'm 
convinced that the direction we're taking is the right one. But we still 
have some tough decisions to make, and we can't rest on our laurels.
    First of all, we've got to pass the budget, and then we have to see 
that the terms of the agreement become law in the appropriations bills. 
Secondly, we have to deal--now that we've dealt with the structural 
deficit in American life, in the years ahead, we're going to have to 
deal with the generational deficit. That is, we have to make sure that 
the burden of us baby boomers retiring does not bankrupt our children, 
number one. And number two, we have to do something about the fact that 
while we have the lowest poverty rate ever recorded among senior 
citizens in America last year--something I am proud of, that's a good 
thing, and America should be proud of it--the poverty rate among 
children under 18 was almost twice the poverty rate among Americans over 
65. So we have challenges still out there awaiting us.
    But what I want to say to you is, we can look at the last 4 years 
and we can look at the last 4 months and understand that as a country, 
our problems are like the problems of any other human endeavor, they 
yield to effort. When you move away from the rhetoric and you move away 
from the hot air and you sit down in good faith and you say, ``What do 
we have to do to keep opportunity alive in America; what do we have to 
do to be a stronger American community; what do we

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have to do to preserve our leadership role in the world,'' we can do 
these things.
    Just one last issue that I'm very concerned about, and that is--and 
as I look around this room--I'm proud of this room for many reasons, but 
I think the fact that we are becoming the world's most diverse 
democracy, in terms of race and ethnicity and religion, is a huge asset 
in a world that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And having 
worked in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and in the Aegean, 
I am mindful of the fact that racial and ethnic conflicts are difficult 
and thorny things. Having pleaded with my friends in Pakistan and India 
to try to resolve their difficulties--I'm glad to see them talking now--
I'm mindful to the fact that these are difficult things.
    But we should be able to see, both from the heartbreak of other 
countries in the world and from the enormous opportunities we are 
creating for ourselves, that if we can find a way to respect our 
differences and be bound closely together by our shared values, it is, I 
think, very likely that the United States in the next 50 years--even 
though we will be a smaller percentage of the world's population and a 
smaller percentage of its overall economy, I think it is very likely 
that we will have even more positive influence in the next 50 years that 
we did in the last 50 years.
    But the number one question that will determine that--mark my 
words--is not an economic question or a Government budget question, it 
is whether we can learn to live together across the lines that divide 
us. That is the single most significant thing, in my judgment, along 
with whether we are willing to exercise our leadership in the world, 
that will determine the shape of the next 50 years. So I intend to work 
hard on the that, and I want you to help me.
    The last thing I would like to say is that--again, regarding your 
presence here tonight--what you have done is to invest in the work of 
America. The purpose of political parties, in my judgment, is not only 
to win elections but to give people a forum within which they can become 
organized to express their views and to have people who represent their 
views act in the public interest. Because you are here, because you have 
supported us, because we won the last election, because we are moving 
forward, this country is a better place. And you made a contribution to 
that. You continue to do it. And I hope tonight when you go home, you 
will be very proud of it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8 p.m. in the Colonial Room at the 
Mayflower Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to dinner cochairs, C. 
Thomas Hendrickson, chair, Democratic Business Council, and Cynthia 
Friedman, chair, Women's Leadership Forum; Alan D. Solomont, national 
finance chair, and Steve Grossman, national chair, Democratic National 
Committee.