[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 2 (Monday, January 15, 2001)]
[Pages 52-57]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan

January 9, 2001

    Thank you very much. Let me say, first of all, how delighted I am to 
be here, to be back at Michigan State. I thank President McPherson and 
the board of trustees for letting me come back. I think if I were to 
come back one more time as President, I've been here so many times I'd 
owe partial tuition at least. [Laughter] I always love coming here, and 
I'm delighted to be here.
    I also want to thank Ed Foy for coming out to meet me in 1992 and 
sticking with me all the way to the end. He gave a great speech, and he 
was a great representative of the working people of Michigan and the 
United States, and I thank him. I want to thank Senator Carl Levin for 
being my friend and being a friend to the people of Michigan. There is 
no Member of the United States Senate today who is more respected than 
Carl Levin, and you should be very proud of him.
    Now, your new Senator, Debbie Stabenow, got her start--she got her 
start in politics when she was still a student and was elected county 
commissioner. So some of the rest of you might get a few ideas from 
that. I am delighted to welcome her to the Senate. I'm so pleased she 
was elected before I left office. And she's in a class of Senators which 
includes some other women that I'm--[applause]--I told Debbie on the way 
in, she and Hillary and the other Senators who were elected in this last 
cycle were sworn in last Wednesday. And when our daughter, Chelsea, and 
I were just sitting up there like all the other families in the Senate 
gallery, being cautioned not to lean over and put our hands on the 
rail--[laughter]--I was trying to be on my best behavior. I didn't 
whistle, shout, or jump, but it was, for me, the happiest day of my life 
since the day my daughter was born. And so I'll always have a special 
feeling about this election.
    I think that Debbie Stabenow showed a great deal of courage and 
character in this election, and she kept on going when a lot of people 
thought she couldn't win. And she'll do you proud there. I've watched 
her in Congress, and she'll be great.
    I would like to thank so many other Members of the Michigan 
congressional delegation who aren't here: Congressmen Levin and Conyers 
and Bonior, who lost his father in the last couple of days, and 
especially my good friend Congressman John Dingell, who's recuperating 
and is still up and around. All the other members of the delegation that 
helped me, I'm very grateful.
    I thank Attorney General Jennifer Granholm for being here, and all 
the people from the Michigan Legislature who are here, but especially 
Representative Kilpatrick, who's been such a good friend of mine. Thank 
you. And Mayor Archer, thank you; Mayor Hollister, thank you.
    And I want to say a special word of appreciation to a man who's been 
one of my closest allies and best friends in political life for way over 
a decade now, your former Governor, and a man who served as a great 
Ambassador to Canada in our administration, Jim Blanchard, and his wife 
Janet. Thank you very much.
    I'd also like to say that when word got out I was coming here, 
everybody in my administration wanted to come with me. I keep telling 
them, we promised to work until the last day in office. I've still got 
some environmental initiatives I want to take--I've still got some other 
things I want to do. But because I came today to talk about the economy, 
what happened over the last 8 years and where we're going, and the 
relationship of the economy to education, I brought two people who have 
been with me every day since I became President: the Secretary of 
Education, Dick Riley, and the Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman. Give 
them a big hand, will you? [Applause] Thank you.
    Believe it or not, there's one person in this audience with whom I 
served 24 years ago

[[Page 53]]

in my first elected position as attorney general of my State, your 
former Attorney General Frank Kelley. Thanks for being here, for 24 
years of friendship. Thank you.
    Now most of all, I want to thank Tom Izzo and the Michigan State 
Spartans for being up here with me. Usually, the national championship 
team comes to Washington. But I'm sort of a short-termer, you know, and 
nothing beats recognizing the team before 14,000 cheering fans. Also, 
there's a lot of sense of humor and kidding in my family, and you may 
know that my daughter is a senior at Stanford. So I'm going to wear that 
Spartan jersey tonight when I go home and see if I can provoke some 
conversation around the dinner table.
    One of the things that I admire about this team--and I followed it 
very closely last year--is that there is no quit in it. I know you had a 
tough game last weekend, but let me tell you, if you play any game in 
life long enough, once in a while somebody will sink a three-point shot, 
falling backwards with your hand in their face. It will happen if you 
play any game long enough--the equivalent will happen to you. It is not 
fatal. The only thing that's fatal is quitting. And you've got no quit 
in that team back there, and that's good.
    The most important thing I want to do today is to say a simple 
thank-you to the people of Michigan State, Lansing, and the State of 
Michigan, for supporting me and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore these 
last 8 years.
    You know, my history with Michigan is profoundly important to the 
opportunity I have had to serve as President. It began with the primary 
victory here on St. Patrick's Day in 1992. It included two general 
elections in which the people of Michigan were kind enough to give me 
their electoral votes. And thanks for making it three in a row last 
November.
    I first visited this campus in 1992. I've come here for debates, 
rallies, and whistle-stop tours. I was the first President since 
Theodore Roosevelt to speak here while in office. I imagine I'm the only 
one to speak here twice. Let me tell you, every time I've come here, 
I've learned something. And even though 8 years is longer than it takes 
most of you to get a degree, my Michigan State education is just about 
complete.
    When I came here--unbelievably, almost 9 years ago now--our economy 
was profoundly troubled and our society was divided. In 1992 there were 
riots in Los Angeles and troubling signs of social division elsewhere. I 
talked to college students in my home State of Arkansas who said they 
were dropping out of school because they couldn't afford to borrow any 
more money and they didn't believe they could get a good job when they 
got out and pay their loans back. I met college students in every State 
in the country, including Michigan, who were afraid they wouldn't get a 
job, even with their diploma.
    I met union workers who thought they would either never work again, 
or if they did, they'd never in their lives get a job paying the same 
amount that they were making before they lost their previous job. 
Industrial production had actually declined that year, for the first 
time in the history of the United States. Average family income fell by 
$1,600 in just 2 years. The Federal deficit was $290 billion and rising. 
The national debt had quadrupled over the previous 12 years. Interest 
rates were high. Growth was low. The confidence of the American people 
was shaken. And just as bad, it had been 13 years since the Spartans had 
won a national championship. [Laughter] It was not the best of times.
    And I asked the American people to send me to Washington for a 
little while, on a mission--a mission to build a 21st century America 
with opportunity for all, responsibility from all citizens, and a 
community of all Americans. I committed to do my best to build a new 
kind of National Government, one that would focus on the future and on 
providing all of our citizens with the conditions and tools necessary to 
build their own lives and make the most of America's future.
    Well, thanks to the good people of Michigan, and people like you 
across this country, Al Gore and I got the precious chance to spend 8 
years in Washington, putting people first, getting the economy going 
again, improving social and environmental conditions, advancing peace, 
freedom, and prosperity

[[Page 54]]

around the world, and building a Government ready to make the most of 
this new century.
    Now, I want to talk just a little about what happened, because it's 
important, when you look to the future, to know what happened in the 
recent past and how it brought us to this present.
    We began with a clear strategy to get the economy going that it had 
three elements: Get the deficit down and get rid of it; in vest more in 
our people; sell more American goods and services around the world. The 
American people did the rest. We are still experiencing the longest 
economic expansion in our history. Our economy is 50 percent bigger than 
it was 8 years ago. When I took office, the national unemployment rate 
was 7.3 percent, 7.4 here in Michigan. Now, it is 4 percent--it's been 
below 5 percent for 3 years--and it's 3.7 percent in Michigan.
    We have--that's the lowest overall unemployment rate in 30 years, 
even though we've got more of our people participating in the work 
force; the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years; the lowest 
African-American and Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded.
    And unlike some of our previous recoveries, this rising tide is 
lifting all boats. In the last 3 years, people at all income levels have 
done better, and the highest percentage increase in income has come in 
the lowest 20 percent of the working population of America in the last 3 
years. Poverty is at a 20-year low; homeownership at an all-time high. 
In 1992, Michigan State graduates who found jobs had an average starting 
salary of just under $26,000. The average salary for last year's 
graduate was over $36,000.
    Now, how did this happen? Well, first, we said we would get rid of 
the deficits and begin to attack the debt. And keep in mind--let me just 
say this again--in the entire history of the country, going back to 
1776, the debt of America quadrupled in the 12 years before we began to 
work. What's happened since? We started with a $290 billion deficit. 
This year, we had a $240 billion surplus. We've had the biggest back-to-
back surpluses in history.By the end of this fiscal year, we will have 
paid down more than $500 billion in our national debt. We're on track to 
be debt-free by the end of the decade, for the first time since 1835.
    Why should you care whether your Government's out of debt? Here's 
why--two reasons. First, economically, if the Government is paying down 
its debt instead of borrowing money, that means there is more money left 
for you at lower interest rates for college loans, car loans, home 
loans, more money for business loans at lower interest rates--means more 
businesses more jobs, higher pay raises, and a higher stock market. The 
average American homeowner in America is now saving $2,000 a year in 
lower home mortgages because we're paying down the debt instead of 
running it up. It makes a huge difference to your future which way we're 
going.
    The second reason, very important to Michigan State where you've got 
a lot of people who depend on student aid, where you compete for 
research funds from the Federal Government, we spend over 11 cents on 
the dollar--nearly 12, and it was headed to 15 when I took office--we 
spend almost 12 cents on the dollar of every tax dollar you pay to the 
Federal Government in interest on the debt. It is the third-biggest item 
in the Federal budget, behind Social Security and defense.
    If we get rid of that 12 percent--12 percent on the Federal debt is 
a huge amount of money in the Federal budget--that's 12 cents on the tax 
dollar we can either give back to you in tax cuts or invest in our 
common future, in education, in health care, in the environment, in 
national defense, in biomedical research, in building a better future.
     So the first thing we said we do is do something about the deficit, 
and we did. And America should keep going until we're debt-free.
    The second thing we said we would do is to increase investment in 
the American people. Now, that's pretty hard when you're cutting 
spending. We had to get rid of hundreds of Government programs. We 
reduced the Federal work force by 300,000, to its smallest size since 
1960 when Dwight Eisenhower was President. But we have, with the passing 
of this budget, more than doubled our investment in education and 
training in the last 8 years. And I'm very proud of that.

[[Page 55]]

    We've had the biggest increase in Head Start in history. We've 
helped Michigan hire more than 1,300 teachers to have smaller classes in 
the early grades of school. We'll have 1.6 million children in after-
school programs this year. We'll have 3.3 million children in the 
Children's Health Insurance Program, leading to the first decline in the 
number of people without health insurance in a dozen years.
    We'll have 13 million Americans taking advantage of the college 
tuition tax credits, the HOPE scholarship and the lifetime learning tax 
credits, expanded Pell grants and work-study programs for helping 
millions more, including--listen to this--more than 115,000 in Michigan, 
including some of you in this audience today.
    I also want to thank Secretary Riley for something else, the direct 
student loan program. Michigan State was one of the earliest 
participants in the direct student loan program. It helps students get 
college loans more quickly, more cheaply, and gives them more options 
for paying it back as a percentage of their income. Since 1993, college 
students have saved $8 billion on their college loans because of the 
direct loan program, and college and universities have saved $5 billion.
    We said that we believed an administration could be pro-business and 
pro-worker, and we've tried to do that. In the last 8 years, we defeated 
attempts to repeal prevailing wage laws, to bring back company unions, 
to weaken occupational safety standards. We cracked down on sweat shops, 
protected pension funds, passed tough new worker safety rules against 
repetitive stress injuries, and raised the minimum wage. And every time 
we did that, somebody said, ``This is really bad for business.'' Every 
year, for the last 8 years, the United States has set a record for new 
small business formations. And we have more jobs in this 8-year period 
than ever before in history.
    We said we believed that the modern economy must be pro-work and 
pro-family. And that's something a lot of the students here probably 
haven't thought of very much. But I can tell you, one of the things that 
I hear all the time, and I used to hear it even more, from people at all 
income levels, including quite high income levels, is that they are 
desperately afraid that they cannot meet their responsibilities at work 
and their responsibilities at home. I hardly know anybody with young 
kids who doesn't have at least one or two searing examples every year, 
where they're worried about whether they've neglected their work or 
neglected their kids.
    Now, bringing up children is the most important work of any society, 
in any time, by far. If we have to make a choice between work and 
family, our economic objectives are defeated before we start. I can tell 
you, I've reached the age now when I can tell you from personal 
experience, knowing hundreds of people my age, if your kids--if life 
doesn't work out for them, it doesn't make a rip how much money you 
have. It doesn't matter how well you've done in business. Nothing else 
matters.
    So this is very, very important. What do we do about it? That's why 
we gave a tax cut, even when we were reducing the deficit, to 15 million 
working families at the lowest levels of income, so anybody that worked 
40 hours a week could use the tax system to get out of poverty, not be 
driven into it. That's why we raised the minimum wage. That's why we 
passed the family and medical leave law, which 25 million Americans have 
been able to use to take some time off when there was a sick child or a 
sick parent or a baby was born, without loosing their job. It's been 
good for the American economy.
    Now, we said we would cut crime, and we did. We put over 100,000 
police on the street, working toward 150,000. We banned assault weapons. 
The Brady law background checks have kept 600,000 felons, fugitives, and 
stalkers from getting guns. Crime is at a 25-year low, violent crime in 
Michigan down 21 percent.
    And I know it was controversial here in Michigan, but I want to say 
again--I'm on the way out, and I'm not running for anything, but let me 
tell you something. I have in my closet an honorary jacket with a 
lifetime membership from the NRA which I got from working with them--
listen to this--when I was Governor of Arkansas, on hunter education 
programs and trying to resolve disputes between retired people who 
retired into unincorporated areas and hunters. I did a lot of work with 
them.

[[Page 56]]

    But I think this business of trying to convince the voters of any 
State in our Nation that somebody who wants to keep guns away from 
criminals and kids is threatening their right to hunt or their right to 
engage in sport shooting--it's just not so. Nobody--it's not so. And I'm 
telling you something: It's not so. Now, you cannot--there is not a 
single law-abiding hunter in the State of Michigan who missed a day in 
the woods because of these initiatives we've taken, nor a single sport 
shooter that missed a single contest. But there's a lot of people alive 
today because those 600,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers could not 
get their handguns.
    We believed--and it was somewhat controversial even in Michigan when 
I said this--that we not only could but we had to grow the economy and 
improve the environment. We believed we could break the iron link 
between putting more greenhouse gases into the air and increasing the 
world's temperature and growing the economy. We believed that new 
sources of energy and new means of energy conservation could provide a 
whole new future, not just for the United States but for the rest of the 
world.
    Now, what have we done? The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. We 
cleaned up 42 toxic waste dumps in Michigan alone, 5 times as many as 
the 2 previous administrations, in 12 years. We're investing your money 
in research in clean technology to make homes, cars, and offices more 
efficient, to create thousands of new high-tech jobs.
    Just last Friday, Ford unveiled an SUV that gets the equivalent of 
40 miles per gallon of gas. And at the Detroit auto show right now--
right now--GM is showing a family sedan that uses electric hybrid 
technology--that is, electricity plus fuel--to get the equivalent of 80 
miles a gallon. These kinds of vehicles will be rolling off the assembly 
line soon. I am proud we supported their development through the 
Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles that we established with 
the UAW and the automakers back in '93 that the Vice President oversaw 
for us for 8 years.
    But it's going to get better. We are also funding research at the 
Department of Agriculture into biofuel, which most of you know as 
ethanol. But you can make fuel out of anything. You can make them out of 
grasses, out of rice hulls, out of any kind of waste product from farms. 
The real problems with it is, today, it takes 7 gallons of gasoline to 
make 8 gallons of biofuel. But we are doing research to try to crack the 
chemical mystery that is the equivalent of how we made gasoline from 
unrefined petroleum, from oil. And when we do--and they're getting very 
close--you will be able to make 8 gallons of biofuel with 1 gallon of 
gasoline, which means everybody will be able to get the equivalent of 
500 miles to the gallon of gasoline. And this environmental issue will 
be much less formidable than it is today. And we will guarantee the 
future of the auto industry in Michigan by doing what is right for the 
environment, not pretending there is no challenge. That's what we've got 
to do.
    Now, let me say to all of you, I love all these statistics; it's 
just nice to have a good story to tell. [Laughter] But this is about 
more than the statistics. It's about more than money. I think there is a 
new feeling in America of possibility, that we are prepared for the 21st 
century, that we can meet the big challenges that are still out there, 
that we can seize the opportunities that are still out there. And I hope 
one reason is that we understand that we need each other more and we 
have to work together more.
    One of the things that really bothered me when I ran for President 
in 1992 is how much politics had become a matter of subtraction and 
division rather than addition and multiplication. What do I mean by 
that? Politicians always assume that they needed wedge issues to divide 
people, and then they wanted their supporters to be more inflamed and 
madder than the other people's supporters. And they hoped that the other 
people's supporters, if you could attack your opponent enough, would get 
disillusioned and wouldn't show up for votes. So they were trying to 
divide and subtract.
    I always thought life worked better when you were trying to add and 
multiply, and I still believe that. I believe that one of the 
fundamental facts of the modern world is that we are growing more and 
more interdependent within our communities, our Nation, and beyond our 
borders. I believe that, therefore, successful social work, including

[[Page 57]]

economics, is becoming more and more like winning a national basketball 
championship. It's a team sport. I don't care how good a star you are; 
if the other four walk off the court, you're whipped. [Laughter] I don't 
care how good you are; five on one, the five win.
    Now, we have to think about this more. I am immensely gratified that 
this generation of young people, I think, understands that better than 
they've gotten credit for. I've never understood all this Generation X 
talk and how young people are selfish and self-seeking. At Michigan 
State alone, 150 students have participated in AmeriCorps since we've 
had that program, out of 150,000 nationwide. We've had more young people 
do community service in AmeriCorps and earn some money to go on to 
college in 6 years than we had in the first 30 years of the Peace Corps. 
The young people of this country understand that they have to build a 
common future together. They understand that we have to find what's 
common about us across all the racial and religious and other lines that 
divide us.
    And that's the last thought I want to leave with you. I've just 
given you a speech mostly about economics today and about the related 
progress we've made in other areas. But if somebody said to me, ``You've 
got to just leave America with one wish,'' believe it or not, more than 
wanting us to be continually successful economically, I would say, ``We 
have to be one America. We have to reach out across all these lines that 
divide us. We have to celebrate our differences.'' And I hope you will 
do that.
    Now, one thing I will not claim is to have solved all the problems. 
You've got big problems out there, or challenges. You've got to deal 
with the aging of America. When the baby boomers like me retire, there's 
going to be a bunch of us. And you can't have Social Security and 
Medicare and the cost of our retirement bankrupt our children's ability 
to raise our grandchildren. We didn't finish that work, but we made it 
easier by putting 25 years on Medicare and putting--we're up to 54 years 
with Social Security now. We did a good job. If we save the money that 
we're piling up on Social Security, we can save 54 years on Social 
Security.
    So we didn't solve global warming, but we made a good dent in it. We 
haven't solved all the economic problems in the inner cities, the Indian 
reservations, the rural communities that have been left behind, but we 
left America with the tools to do it.
    And what I want to ask all of you to do is to think about where we 
are now and where we were 8 years ago. And then, imagine in your own 
mind--do what I did 8 years ago, especially the young people--imagine 
where you would like America to be 10 years from now; where would you 
like Michigan to be 10 years from now? What do you think it would take 
to get you there? I can tell you that no matter what strategy you adopt, 
you will have to continue to invest in people, to put education first, 
to care about balancing work and family, to care about balancing 
business and labor, to care about balancing the economy and the 
environment.
    And if we think about the future with those sorts of basic values 
and never forgetting our mutual need for one another and that America 
wins when we treat every single endeavor like a team sport, the best 
days of this country are still ahead.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:40 p.m. in the Jack Breslin Student 
Events Center. In his remarks, he referred to Peter McPherson, 
president, Michigan State University; Ed Foy, assistant director, United 
Auto Workers Region I-C, who introduced the President; Michigan Attorney 
General Jennifer M. Granholm; State Representative Kwame M. Kilpatrick; 
Mayor Dennis W. Archer of Detroit; Mayor David C. Hollister of Lansing; 
and Tom Izzo, basketball coach, Michigan State Spartans. A portion of 
these remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.