[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 39 (Monday, October 4, 1999)]
[Pages 1824-1825]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
The President's Radio Address

September 25, 1999

    Good morning. With only 5 days left in the current fiscal year, 
Congress still has a lot of work to do. For almost 7 years now, Vice 
President Gore and I have pursued a new economic strategy that focused 
on fiscal discipline, expanding trade in American products and services, 
and investing in our people and new technology.
    The results are now clear. The past 6\1/2\ years have produced the 
longest peacetime expansion in history: more than 19 million new jobs; 
rising wages; the lowest unemployment, welfare, and crime rates in a 
generation; the highest levels of homeownership ever; a balanced budget; 
and the largest surplus ever. It has given the American people more 
money in their paychecks, lower interest rates for homes and cars, more 
help through efforts like the HOPE scholarship to open the doors of 
college to all. We're on a path of progress and prosperity. The American 
people want it to continue.
    That's why 2 days ago I vetoed the Republicans' risky $792 billion 
tax plan. It was just too big, too bloated; it would place too big a 
burden on our economy and run the risk of higher interest rates and 
lower growth. Also, it didn't add a day to the Social Security Trust 
Fund or a dollar to Medicare. And it would have forced cuts of nearly 50 
percent in everything from education to health care to the environment 
to veterans programs to national security, even in air traffic safety.
    It would have created an untenable choice for the Congress: these 
irresponsible cuts on the one hand; or on the other, diverting ever more 
funds from the Social Security surplus and from debt reduction. We said, 
all of us did just a few months ago, that we shouldn't spend the Social 
Security surplus anymore.
    Today I say again to the congressional majority, we don't have to do 
that. I gave them a plan to expand the life of the Social Security Trust 
Fund 50 years, to extend Medicare over 25 years, and add prescription 
drug coverage, to invest in education and other priorities, to provide 
an affordable tax cut, and

[[Page 1825]]

still to pay down the debt and make us debt-free as a nation for the 
first time since 1835.
    But the congressional majority continues on a track that doesn't 
adequately fund America's real priorities, while already spending large 
amounts of the Social Security surplus, instead of preserving it for 
debt reduction. A month ago their own Congressional Budget Office 
estimated they'd used $16 to $19 billion of the surplus for Social 
Security, and steps they've taken since then have only made it go 
higher. They have used what the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, 
and others have called budget gimmicks to give the impression that they 
have simply created $17 billion out of thin air.
    At the same time, they're still not providing nearly enough for 
education and other vital priorities. In fact, the very same day I 
vetoed their budget-busting tax plan, they passed a bill out of 
committee that would seriously undermine our efforts to strengthen 
education. It would eliminate our effort to hire 100,000 quality 
teachers and reduce class size--something they themselves endorsed last 
year at election time. It would deny hundreds of thousands of young 
people access to after-school programs. It would eliminate our mentoring 
program, which is designed to get poor children into college. It doesn't 
improve or expand Head Start. It cuts the successful America Reads 
program, which now involves students from a thousand colleges going to 
tens of thousands of our young children to make sure then can read. It 
cuts our efforts to connect all our classrooms and schools to the 
Internet by the year 2000. And, again, there's not any funding for our 
plan to build or modernize 6,000 schools. All this at a time when we 
need to be doing more, not less, to prepare for the 21st century--for 
what is now the largest group of schoolchildren in our history.
    There's a better way. The Republicans should work with us to create 
a budget that pays for itself with straightforward proposals like our 
tobacco policy. They should work with us to create a real Social 
Security lockbox that would devote the entire surplus to debt reduction 
from Social Security taxes and extend the life of Social Security until 
the middle of the next century--something their plan doesn't do.
    Thursday I asked the Republicans to work with me on bipartisan 
Medicare proposal, to modernize Medicare and provide voluntary 
prescription drug benefits and keep it solvent until 2027. Following a 
meeting with my advisers, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, 
Bill Roth, has agreed to engage in serious discussion on meaningful 
Medicare reform.
    I'm reaching out to the Republicans to engage with us on Medicare. I 
want to do the same on education, on Social Security, on paying down our 
debt. We owe it to the American people to give it our best efforts. The 
results could make the 21st century America's best days.
    Thanks for listening.

Note: The address was recorded at 5:27 p.m. on September 24 in the Oval 
Office at the White House for broadcast at 10:06 a.m. on September 25. 
The transcript was made available by the Office of the Press Secretary 
on September 24 but was embargoed for release until the broadcast.