[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 2 (Monday, January 17, 2000)]
[Pages 56-62]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council
January 12, 2000
Thank you. Well, first of all, I think we ought to acknowledge that
public speaking is not something Jessica does every day, and I think she
did a terrific job. I thank her for coming here.
I want to thank Tommy and Sarah and Maggie and Aliza and Grandmother
for coming also, so that you would have a human, real example of the
subject I want to address today, and one of the biggest reasons I ran
for President.
[[Page 57]]
I thank my old friend Senator Joe Lieberman for his leadership of
the Democratic Leadership Council. President and Mrs. Trachtenberg,
thank you for welcoming me back to George Washington.
I want to acknowledge two other people in the audience today,
without whom many of us would never have been able to do what has been
done, and particularly, I am indebted to them: first, Will Marshall, who
runs the Progressive Policy Institute of the DLC, who has been at this
for well over a decade and come up with so many of the ideas that have
been hallmarks of our administration. And I want to thank my long-time
friend Eli Segal, who actually gave birth, in fact, to two of our most
important ideas, AmeriCorps, our national service program. He set
AmeriCorps up, and then he set up the Welfare to Work Partnership, which
has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being hired by private
business from the welfare rolls. So thank you both for coming here and
for what you have done for our country.
I always get nervous when people start talking about legacies, the
way Senator Lieberman did. You know, alliteration having the appeal it
does, it's just one small step from legacy to lame duck. I keep hearing
that. [Laughter] And I've finally figured out what a lame duck is.
That's when you show up for a speech and no one comes. [Laughter] So
thank you for making me feel that we're still building on that legacy
today.
I want to put the issue I came here to discuss today, which directly
affects the Cupp family and so many tens of thousands like them all
across America, in the larger context of what we have been about since
1993, in January.
Eight years ago, when I ran for President, I came here to Washington
and asked for change in our party, change in our national leadership,
and change in our country, not change for its own sake but because in
1992 our Nation was in the grip of economic distress, social decline,
political gridlock, and discredited Government. The old answers plainly
were obsolete, and new conditions clearly demanded a new approach.
By 1992, we in the DLC had been working for some years on a new
approach, rooted in the basic American values of opportunity,
responsibility, and community; dedicated to promoting both work and
family here in the United States and to promoting America's leadership
around the world for peace and freedom, security and democracy. We
believed that Government was neither the primary problem, as the new
Republicans had been telling us for a decade by then, or the primary
solution, as many New Deal Democrats still earnestly believed. Instead,
we asked for a new direction for our National Government, with a focus
on creating the conditions and providing people the tools to make the
most of their own lives and a commitment to a partnership with the
private sector and with State and local government, so that the Federal
Government would be a catalyst, promoting and experimenting vigorously
with new ideas. It would be a smaller and less bureaucratic but a more
active
Government.
Those of us who were in the vanguard of this movement called
ourselves New Democrats, and we said our agenda was a third way, a way
to create a vital center that would bring people together and move our
country forward. But we were also quick to acknowledge that labels don't
define a politician or a political movement, ideas do.
Our new ideas were first built on the premise that we had to discard
the false choices that then defined politics here in our Nation's
Capital.
We believed, for example, that we could both eliminate the deficit
and increase our investment in education, in science and technology, in
the truly significant national priorities. We believed we could be pro-
business and pro-labor. We believed we could be pro-growth and pro-
environment. We believed we could reform welfare to require those who
are able to work and still do more for poor children and poor families.
We believed we could improve education both by raising standards and
accountability and investing more where it was urgently needed. We
believed we could help Americans succeed both at work and at home,
rather than forcing them to make a choice, as so many, regrettably,
still have to do every single day. We believed we could lower the crime
rate both with more effective punishment and with more effective
prevention. We believed we
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could lead the world with greater military strength and more diplomatic
aid and cooperative efforts with other nations.
We had a whole lot of new policy ideas that we implemented. I'll
just mention a few: the empowerment zone program and the reinventing
Government program that the Vice President's led so brilliantly;
community development financial institutions; AmeriCorps, which now has
given over 150,000 young Americans the chance to serve in their
community and to earn some money for a college education; the HOPE
scholarships, which along with our other college incentives have
effectively opened the doors of college to all Americans; the V-chip;
trade, with environmental and labor considerations taken into account;
after-school programs; 100,000 police; the Brady bill; the family and
medical leave law; the assault weapons ban; housing vouchers for people
on welfare to move closer to where the jobs are; environmental right-to-
know laws; and many, many other ideas, all within this basic framework
of opportunity, responsibility, and community, all with a view toward a
Government that was less bureaucratic but more
active.
Today, we're in a position to make an assessment--very different
from 1992. In 1992 Al Gore and I went around the country and made an
argument to the American people, and they took a chance on us. And our
friends in the Republican Party said, even after I got elected
President, that none of it would work. They said our economic plan would
explode the deficit and bring on another recession. They said our crime
bill, with 100,000 police and the assault weapons ban and the Brady
bill, would do nothing to lower the crime rate or the murder rate. And I
could go on and on and on, through issue after issue after issue.
Well, back in 1992, it was, after all, just an argument, and the
American people took a chance. Now I think we can safely say the
argument is over, for one simple reason: It has been put to rest by the
record. We have been fortunate enough to implement virtually all the
ideas that were advocated in the 1992 campaign, and most of those
advanced in the '96 campaign. And we now have 7 years of measurable
results. Some of them were mentioned by Senator Lieberman, but I think
it's worth going over again, to set the stage for the point I want to
make, which is the more important one.
We have the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years, the
lowest unemployment rate and the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years,
over 20 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the
lowest murder rate in 30 years, the first back-to-back surpluses in our
budget in 42 years, the highest homeownership in history. And in just a
few weeks, now, we'll have the longest economic expansion in the history
of the country, including those when we were fully mobilized for
wartime.
In addition to that, there has been a definite improvement in the
social complexion of America. We have the lowest child poverty rate in
more than 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the
lowest African-American unemployment and poverty rates ever recorded,
the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate ever, the lowest Hispanic poverty
rate in 25 years, the lowest poverty rate among single-parent households
in 46 years.
Along the way, we have immunized 90 percent of our children against
serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of America.
We have 2 million more kids out of poverty and 2 million more children
with health insurance. Twenty million people have taken advantage of the
family and medical leave law. Over 450,000 people have been denied the
right to buy a handgun because they were felons, fugitives, or stalkers,
under the Brady bill. We have cleaner air, cleaner water. We have
cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps as in the previous 12
years.
And yesterday I had the privilege to go to the Grand Canyon to set
aside another million acres of land. Now in the lower 48 States, we have
protected more land than any administration in American history, except
those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.
Our country has helped to further the cause of peace from Northern
Ireland to the Middle East to Bosnia and Kosovo to Haiti; established
new partnerships with Latin America, Asia, and Africa for economic
cooperation; restrained the nuclear missile programs of North Korea;
fought against Iraq's
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weapons of mass destruction program; worked to reduce the threat of
terrorism, chemical, and biological weapons; cut thousands of nuclear
weapons in the arsenals of Russia and the United States; expanded NATO;
increased our debt relief and economic assistance to the poorest
countries of the world. We have helped to minimize economic problems in
Asia and Mexico and concluded over 270 trade agreements, all with a view
toward implementing the basic ideas that were articulated in 1992 and
developed in the years before through the Democratic Leadership Council.
Now what does that mean in practical terms to all of you and
especially to the young people in this audience? It means for the first
time in my lifetime, we begin a new century with greater prosperity,
greater social progress, greater national self-confidence, with the
absence of an internal crisis or an external threat that could derail
our further forward movement. This has never happened in my lifetime.
The first time I came to George
Washington University was in September of 1964, to a Judy Collins
concert in Lisner Auditorium. [Laughter] I remember it well. Some of you
were not alive then, maybe more than half of you. That's the last time
we had this sort of economic growth and this kind of range of interest
in our country toward helping people who had been left out and left
behind or were in distress. But we were unable to resolve the civil
rights challenge at home without major crises, including riots in our
cities, and our efforts to deal with that came a cropper with the costs
in the burden of carrying on the war in Vietnam.
In my lifetime, we have never had a chance like this--never. And I
would argue to you that the most important question today is not what
we've done for the last 7 years in turning the ship of state around and
moving America forward, but what are we going to do now that we have the
chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children?
That's the most important thing. I am gratified by all the results that
I just recounted to you, but after all, that's what you hired me to do.
And that's what our administration signed on to do.
The question is, what are we going to do now? What will you do, as
citizens, when I am no longer here, and I'm just a citizen like you? As
a country, what will be our driving vision?
The thing I worry about most is that when people have been through
tough times and they've achieved a lot, the first thing that you want to
do is sort of relax. And most everybody here who's lived any number of
years can remember at least once in his or her life when you made a
mistake by getting distracted or short-sighted because things seemed to
be going so well you didn't think you had to think about anything else.
That can happen to a country just as it can happen to a person, a
family, or a business. So the great challenge for us today is to make up
our minds, what are we going to do with this magic moment of promise?
What I want us to do is to put our partisan divisions aside to
complete the unfinished business of the last century, including things
like the Patients' Bill of Rights, sensible legislation to keep guns out
of the hands of criminals and children, the hate crimes legislation, all
the things that were still on the agenda when Congress went home, but to
deal with these big, long-term challenges.
What are they? The aging of America--the number of people over 65
will double in the next 30 years. I hope to be one of them. [Laughter]
The children of America, the largest and most diverse group ever--in a
globalized information society education is more important than ever,
and we must give all of them a world-class education.
We can make America--yes, we've got the lowest crime rate in over 25
years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years--no one believes it's the
safest--safe as it ought to be here. We ought to dedicate ourselves to
making America the safest big country in the world.
We've proved that we can improve the environment and grow the
economy, but we still aren't taking the challenge of global warming
seriously. And we still not have said explicitly: The world has changed;
it is no longer necessary to grow rich by despoiling the environment. In
fact, you can generate more wealth over a longer period of time by
improving the environment. America ought to prove that, instead of
continuing to be a
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problem and having our heads in the sand on the issue of climate change.
We ought to dedicate ourselves not just to running surpluses but to
getting America out of debt for the first time since 1835, so that all
the young people here will have lower interest rates and a healthier
economy throughout their adult lifetime. We ought to dedicate ourselves
to bringing opportunity to the people and places who have been left
behind. We ought to dedicate ourselves to building a world in which
there is a more human face on the global economy and in which we work
with our friends and neighbors to deal with the new threats of
terrorism, ethnic, racial, and religious warfare, and chemical and
biological weapons.
And we ought to recognize that in a world in which we know the most
important job is still--is still--the job that Jessica and her husband
have taken on of raising these three children. We cannot allow--we
cannot allow--our country to be a place where you have to make a
decision about to whether succeed at home or to succeed at work. Because
if we ever get to the point where a significant number of our people
have to make that decision, we are in serious trouble. And too many have
to make it every day, anyway, because they can't afford child care, or
because of the burdens of the basic cost of raising their children in
dignity and good health imposed on their limited ability to earn money,
even in this prosperous economy. And that's the thing I want to focus on
today, because I think when the American family is doing well, the
family of America does well.
In the State of the Union Address, I will put forth my last, but
still a new agenda, rooted in responsibility, designed to create a
wider, stronger, more inclusive American community, and to create new
opportunity. Today I want to talk about one important element of the new
opportunity agenda.
We know that we are now in a position to do more to create
opportunity or, as Senator Lieberman and Al From say, to expand the
winner's circle, to include men, women, and children still at the
margins of society who are willing to work and ought to be rewarded for
it.
The ideas that I will advance in the State of the Union will be
built on what we have been talking about since 1992, advancing our
understanding of what opportunity means in the information age. For
example, once textbooks were central to a child's understanding in
education; today, computers are. Once a ninth-grade education was all
anyone needed for a job, then a high school education; today, the only
people who have good chances of getting jobs which will grow over time
in income, over a longer period of time, are those who have at least 2
years of some sort of post-high school education and training.
One new opportunity agenda tries to take account of these new
demands but also the new pressures on working families, including the
need for quality, affordable child care and the importance of being able
to access health care.
The main idea here is still the old idea of the American dream, that
if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life
and a chance for your children to have a better one. That's been the
basic goal of so much of what we've done, from the earned-income tax
credit to the empowerment zone program the Vice President ran, to the
microcredit program the First Lady's done so much to advance, to
increasing the minimum wage, to greater access to health care and child
care, to the partnerships that we have made with so many American
businesses to help people move from welfare to work.
Now, I will have more to say about all these other ideas later. But
I just want to talk a little bit today, in closing, about what we should
do with the earned-income tax credit, something that you've heard
Jessica say has already helped the Cupp family to raise their children
but something that is not as helpful now as it was when they first drew
it.
In my State of the Union Address and in my budget for 2001, I will
propose a substantial increase in the earned-income tax credit. It's a
targeted tax cut for low income working families.
In 1992, as has already been said, one of the first things that I
did as President was to ask Congress to dramatically expand the EITC. It
had been on the books for some
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time; it had been broadly supported by Democrats and Republicans.
President Reagan had hailed it. Everybody seemed to like it, because
basically it involved a tax credit for people who were working and had
children--almost all of them have children--and who just didn't have
enough to get along on.
It is not just another acronym. The EITC was anonymous, I think, in
America until a previous Congress tried to do something to it, and then
all of a sudden it became something we all knew about and liked, which
was immensely gratifying to me. But the EITC stands for, again I will
say, the E is about earned, it's about working, it's about a fundamental
American value, it's about rewarding people who do what they're supposed
to do.
I think every one of you, when Jessica was up here talking,
describing the conditions of their children's birth, their work
histories, how they had worked hard to provide a decent home for their
kids, every one of us was sitting here pulling for them. Every one of
you identified with their struggle. Every one of you could imagine what
it would have been like to be the father in the delivery room and see
these kids come out, one, two, three. [Laughter]
Every one of you. That's what this country is all about, the
dignity, the struggles, the triumphs, the joys of daily life that we all
share. And I think our Government has a responsibility, as part of our
basic compact with the American people, to make sure that families like
the Cupps find that work does pay, to make sure that we reward work and
that we enable them to succeed at their even more important job, raising
those three little girls. It is still, I will say again, society's most
important job. And I suspect that every parent in this room today agrees
with me about that.
So these incentives to work are just as important to how life plays
out for millions of Americans, as the rate of economic growth or
interest rates or debt reduction. Studies from Harvard to Wisconsin have
confirmed that the EITC is an enormously powerful incentive to work. It
encourages people who are on welfare, who are unemployed, to move into
the work force, even in modest-paying jobs, because their income will
be, in effect, increased; they'll get a check at the end of the year as
a credit against the taxes they pay, because they're working hard for
modest income.
Now, in 1998 the EITC helped more than 4.3 million people make that
move. That's double the number that were being helped in 1993, when we
advocated the expansion. This tax credit is a major reason, along with
the strength of the economy, the rise in the minimum wage, and the
movement from welfare to work, that there are fewer people in poverty
today than there have been in over 20 years. It explains why the child
poverty rate is lower than it's been in over 20 years, and why poverty
among African-American children is the lowest on record, and the lowest
among a quarter century among Hispanic children.
Now, because we know this works, and we know there are still far too
many families and children in or near poverty and far too many people
struggling and working, having a tough time taking care of their
children, we know there is more to do. Today I am proposing the
following changes in the EITC.
First, I want to eliminate the marriage penalty exacted by the EITC
to make sure that the tax credit rewards marriage and family just as it
rewards work. It's a big problem.
Second--the next two are very important to the Cupp family; they
will affect all the families in our country like them, and there are a
lot of them--I am proposing to expand the EITC for families with three
or more children.
The pressures on these families rise as their ranks increase.
Twenty-eight percent of them--let me say that again--28 percent of them
are in poverty, more than twice the rate for smaller families. Our plan
would provide these families tax relief that is up to $1,200 more than
what they now receive. The way the EITC works now, it's a really good
deal if you're working for a very modest income and you have two kids.
But the benefits drop off dramatically after that. And I don't think we
ought to make these folks choose among those little girls and others in
their situation.
Now, the third thing we're going to do is to give more people more
incentives to continue to work their way into the middle class.
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You heard Jessica say that when her husband's income reached $30,000,
the EITC benefit dropped off dramatically. We set these ceilings back in
1993, and they haven't been really adjusted since then. What we want to
do now is to phase the EITC credit out more gradually. It has to be
phased out, but if it's phased out too sharply, then there is, in
effect, for families with a lot of kids, almost no net gain to earning a
higher income. And if he's going to work longer than 40 hours a week and
he's going to miss more hours at home with those kids, then we want him
to receive the benefits of that. And again, I say, this is not just
about this one family; they represent millions of people in this
country.
So that's what we're going to do: Eliminate the marriage penalty,
increase aid to families with three or more kids, and phase the credit
out more gradually, so there's always an incentive to keep working to
improve your income and your ability to support your children.
Now, for families like the Cupps, these new initiatives would mean
an additional tax credit of $850. That would help them to provide for
their children or own a home or buy a car that makes it easier to get to
work and, therefore, to work.
We dedicate $21 billion to these priorities over 10 years,
increasing our investment in people without in any way undermining our
commitment to a balanced budget and to getting us out of debt over the
next 15 years.
Opportunity for all is a measure of not only how far we've come and
where we're going but what kind of people we are. Robert
Kennedy once said, ``our society, all our values, are views of each
other and our own self-esteem.'' The contribution we can make to
ourselves, our families, and the community around us--all these things
are built on the work we do.
The young people here, the students here, are probably beginning to
think about the work you will do. I hope because you're getting a good
education, more than anything else, you'll be able to do something that
you love. And if you do something that you love, I believe that you
ought to be properly rewarded for it and that you ought also to have the
freedom to raise a strong family while you're doing it. That's what
today is all about.
And if there is anything that America ought to be about in the 21st
century, it ought to be about finally, really creating opportunity for
all, a responsible nation of all citizens, and a community in which
everyone has the chance to do the most important work of all: raise
strong, healthy, happy children.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 1:45 p.m. in the Dorothy Betts Marvin
Theatre at George
Washington University. In his remarks, he referred to Jessica Cupp, who
introduced the President, her husband, Tommy, and their triplets Sarah,
Maggie, and Aliza; Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, founder, New Democratic
Network; Stephen J. Trachtenberg, president, George Washington
University, and his wife, Francine Zorn Trachtenberg; William Marshall,
president and founder, Progressive Policy Institute; Eli Segal,
president, Welfare to Work Partnership; and Al From, president,
Democratic Leadership Council.