[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 40 (Monday, October 5, 1998)]
[Pages 1934-1937]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Achieving a Budget Surplus

September 30, 1998

    Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying to Kay McClure, we thank 
you for being here. All of us who have been a part of this effort to 
tame the deficit and to turn our economy around, we did it for people 
like you. And I think you made everybody here proud to be an American 
and everybody who was part of that project proud of that.
    I'd like to thank the members of the Cabinet and administration who 
are here, and the former Cabinet members. I would also like to say that 
we invited Henry Fowler, who was President Johnson's Treasury Secretary 
the last time the budget was balanced, to come here, but he couldn't 
come because of hip surgery. Our thoughts are with him, and his thoughts 
are with us today.
    I want to thank Senator Moynihan and Senator Robb, Senator 
Rockefeller, Senator Breaux, Senator Conrad, Senator Dorgan. Mr. Sabo, 
who was our chair, along with Senator Moynihan back in '93; and 
Congressmen Boyd, Brown, Edwards, Filner, Congresswoman Furse, 
Congressmen Hastings, Hinojosa, Markey, Vento, Wise, and Congresswoman 
Thurman for being here.
    The Vice President also noted that there were several former Members 
of Congress here who voted for the budget in 1993. There are quite a 
number here, and since they--most of them who are here paid quite a high 
price for doing what makes it possible for us to be here today, I'd like 
to ask them to stand. Would every Member of Congress who is no longer a 
Member of Congress, who was here and voted for that budget in '93 please 
stand. Thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you.
    Mark Twain once said that two things nobody should ever have to 
watch being made are laws and sausages. And the aftermath sometimes is 
not very pretty. They and many others had to endure being accused of 
raising taxes on people they didn't, being accused of not lowering taxes 
for people they did, and all manner of other perfidy to try to bring us 
to this moment, to break the spell that had gripped America and led to a 
quadrupling of the debt of this country in the previous 12 years. And a 
lot of the people who are still here took very significant risks, as 
well, and set the stage for what has been done since.
    Let me ask you to begin by just thinking about what 29 years means. 
Twenty-nine

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years ago Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Bonanza was one of our top-
rated TV shows, and Sammy Sosa was one year old. [Laughter] We have 
waited a long time for this, not quite as long as we waited for Roger 
Maris' record to be broken but nearly.
    For 29 years, the last day of the fiscal year was not a day of 
celebration but a day we were handed a powerful reminder of our 
Government's inability to live within its means. In the 12 years before 
this administration took office the debt quadrupled, partisan gridlock 
intensified, and a crushing debt was being imposed upon our children. 
These deficits hobbled economic growth, spiked interest rates, robbed 
too many people of their chance at the American dream.
    The end of this fiscal year, obviously, is different as the flashing 
sign behind me shows. Tonight at midnight, America puts an end to three 
decades of deficits and launches a new era of balanced budgets and 
surpluses. While the numbers will not be official until the end of the 
month, we expect the 1998 surplus to be about $70 billion. [Applause] 
Thank you.
    This is the largest surplus on record and, as a percentage of our 
economy, the largest one since the 1950's. Our economy is the strongest 
in a generation. That's why we see the deficit clock has become a 
surplus clock. It will tally the growing opportunities of the 21st 
century. It is a landmark achievement not just for those in this room 
who have played a role in it but, indeed, for all the American people. 
And it will be a gift-giving achievement for generations to come.
    I want you to think about what this means for our democracy and also 
what it means for our obligations now. First and foremost, as our 
previous speaker so eloquently noted, balancing the budget has brought 
tangible economic benefits to the American people.
    In the 1980's, high interest rates kept entrepreneurs from starting 
new businesses. Tight money made it harder for people to buy a new home. 
When I came to Washington 6 years ago nearly everybody felt our economy 
was drifting. College graduates were having a hard time finding jobs; 
factory workers were seeing their industries fall behind foreign 
competition. The deficit then was $290 billion and projected to be over 
$350 billion this year alone.
    But even more than the economic problems, the deficit seemed to be 
Exhibit A for those who claimed that America was in decline. The notion 
seems preposterous today. But it's worth remembering that just a decade 
ago the idea of America in decline was widely accepted in some circles, 
not only here but around the world. There were works of scholarship 
suggesting we were bound to go the way of other powers who had risen and 
then fallen. There was a little defeatism that became part of the 
conventional wisdom here in Washington, symbolized by this National 
Government that was inefficient, ineffectual, and insolvent. And 
therefore, the Government became the poster child for what people said 
was happening to America. The two political parties seemed inevitably 
locked in a series of false choices between old ideas competing in a 
very new time.
    But a funny thing happened on the road to American decline. The 
American people stepped in. Just as we have at every critical juncture 
in our history, the people came together once again to become the 
captains of our fate, the commanders of our destiny. That is really what 
we celebrate here today.
    The American people simply demanded a new direction. They demanded 
that our Government put its house in order. They demanded that America's 
greatness be reasserted, that opportunity be provided again to all who 
are willing to work for it. They demanded that we be able to say with 
confidence that the greatest days of this country still lie before us.
    And so, in 1993, the Members of our party in Congress, some at the 
cost of their careers, took the courageous action which began the road 
we celebrate today, a new economic strategy that reduced the deficit by 
more than 90 percent. Then 4 years later, Congress put progress over 
partisanship and passed a bipartisan balanced budget agreement that 
closed the rest of the deficit gap and will keep us in balance 
structurally for many years to come.
    The deficit reduction has saved the American people more than a 
trillion dollars on the national debt. The new strategy has helped lead 
to lower interest rates, higher

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investments, unprecedented prosperity. We have already heard about that. 
The unemployment rate is the lowest in 28 years, the percentage of 
Americans on welfare the lowest in 29 years, the inflation rate the 
lowest in 33 years. More than 6 million American families have realized 
their dreams of owning a first home; another 10 million have refinanced 
their homes they had. Today, homeownership is the highest in history. 
And for millions of Americans, these lower interest rates have amounted 
to an unofficial tax cut of tens of billions of dollars, making a 
college education, a new car, a family vacation more affordable.
    Now, balancing the budget and increasing our investment in our 
people is the core of a new vision of Government, one that lives within 
its means; one that is the smallest in 35 years but, with the Vice 
President's leadership, has been redesigned to meet the challenges of 
this new era; one that cuts wasteful spending but also makes significant 
investments in education, health, and the environment. We have done a 
lot to make this new economy. But we now have to do more to see that all 
our people can participate in it fully.
    Our success has helped to inspire confidence here and around the 
world. Six years ago, when I went to my first G-7 meeting in Tokyo, 
every leader told me that America was holding the rest of the world back 
and that, unless we were willing to get our deficit down, we would 
always be a drag on the world; we were taking money away; we were 
keeping interest rates high; that it was unfair.
    Well, what we have done in the last 6 years has also helped to spark 
economic growth elsewhere. But now that there is so much turbulence for 
other reasons in other parts of the world, it is important to remember 
that our growing economy is today serving as a bulwark of stability in 
the rest of the world and that without it the rest of the world would be 
in much worse shape, indeed.
    Now, let me just ask you very briefly before we close in this 
celebration, what are we going to do with this moment of celebration of 
the balanced budget and unprecedented prosperity? What exactly are we 
going to do with it? That really is before the American people today.
    We see from troubled economies around the world, in my view, that 
this is not a time to simply celebrate and rest. It is not a time to be 
distracted from our mission of strengthening our country for the new 
century, of leading the world toward prosperity and peace and freedom, 
of bringing our people together.
    For the sake of our children, now that we've balanced the budget, I 
think the first thing we ought to do is commit ourselves to save Social 
Security for the 21st century. The system is in very good shape now, but 
everyone knows in its present terms it is not sustainable when the baby 
boomers retire. And that if we do not act now, when the baby boomers do 
retire, we will be confronted with two very unpleasant choices: One is 
to lower the standard of living of the baby boomers so that their 
children can continue on with their business; the other is to lower the 
standard of living of their children and their ability to raise our 
grandchildren so that we can live in the same manner that seniors today 
are living. Neither choice need be made if we act now with discipline 
and use the fact that we're going to have this surplus to make a 
downpayment and to begin with deliberation to save Social Security. It 
is a huge issue.
    Now I am well aware that it is a popular thing, particularly right 
here, just 4 weeks and change before an election day, to serve up a tax 
cut, to say, ``Well, we've got a surplus. We're going to give you some 
of your money back.'' But all of us know this surplus was run up over 
the years--or the deficit over the years was made smaller because we 
actually were taking in more money in Social Security taxes than we were 
paying out. And all of us know that this problem is looming out there 
and will need money to fix. And so I think the American people have 
waited 29 years, and I think most Americans would like to see the ink 
change from red to black and then just dry a little--[laughter]--before 
we put it at risk.
    But if you think about this issue, there is hardly anything that 
goes to the core of what we are as a people more than our sense that we 
owe an obligation to both our parents and our children. And if we 
squander this surplus and start spending a little here, a little there,

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a little yonder on the tax cuts just because we're a few weeks before an 
election, before we take care of this, what are we going to do when 
times get tough and we still have to take care of it?
    So I say to all of you again, I think that's the first thing that we 
ought to do. We are not against tax cuts. There are tax cuts in this 
budget, as has already been said, for education, for child care, to help 
small businesses provide pensions for their employees. There are tax 
cuts for environmental investments that help to cut energy bills. But we 
don't take any money out of the surplus. We adopted a disciplined 
framework for the future in 1997. We ought not to depart from it. We had 
a bipartisan commitment to that framework in 1997, and we ought not to 
depart from it.
    The second thing we ought to do is to recognize that we have money 
set aside in the budget to invest in education, and we're still a long 
way from having the ability to say that every American child can get a 
world-class education. We ought to fund smaller classes. We ought to 
fund the initiative to revitalize, repair, or build 5,000 schools, to 
hook up all our classrooms to the Internet, to give kids in troubled 
communities mentoring programs, guarantees they can go on to college, 
after-school programs, summer schools programs, the kind of things that 
don't treat them as failures just because the system they've been in has 
failed.
    We ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights for the 160 million 
Americans that are in managed care to put health care first and make 
sure you're managing for a healthier America, not the other way around. 
We ought to keep the economy going and maintain our leadership in the 
global economy by funding our fair share of the International Monetary 
Fund because, as Alan Greenspan said the other day, we cannot forever 
maintain our position as an island of prosperity in a sea of distress.
    Now, that's what we ought to be doing. So we're here to celebrate. 
But this country is here now, after 220 years, still again at the top of 
its game, having totally debunked all the defeatists who said we were in 
decline. But let's not forget why it happened. Don't you ever forget 
that these seven people back here stood up, and a lot like them, and 
laid their jobs on the line for America's future.
    Now, when no one has that kind of risk, nobody is being asked to cut 
their throat and give up a job they love and work they believe in to do 
the right thing, no one is being asked to do that, how can we possibly 
walk away from this session of Congress, when there is no pain in doing 
the right thing, not the kind of pain they had to endure, without saying 
we're going to save Social Security first, put education as our first 
investment priority, pass a Patients' Bill of Rights, and keep America 
and the world's economy growing? How can we do that? We owe it to the 
people who made the sacrifice that brought us to this day to build for 
another day. We should not sit on or celebrate this balanced budget. We 
should build on it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:21 a.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to J. ``Kay'' McClure, 
president, Walhonde Tools, Inc., who introduced the President, and 
former Representative Martin Olav Sabo.