[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 41 (Monday, October 14, 1996)]
[Pages 1999-2005]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
Remarks to Business Leaders in Stamford, Connecticut
October 7, 1996
Thank you so much. Thank you, Carolyn Straddle, for reminding us
ultimately of what free enterprise and opportunity are all about, giving
people a chance to live up to the fullest of what God put inside them, a
chance to live out their dreams, a chance to do right by their children,
a chance to inspire others. Thank you, Bill Esrey, Paul Allaire, and
George David, for your support and for your statements.
I'd like to thank the people from our administration who are here
today who helped us to put this remarkable group of business leaders
together. Thank you, my old friend, Eli Segal. Thank you, Mack McLarty.
Thank you, my campaign manager, Peter Knight. Thank you, Laura Tyson.
Thank you, Alexis Herman, Nancy Rubin. There may be lots of others, but
I saw those people here. I'll get a checklist, and we'll see how good a
grade I made when this is over. [Laughter]
I'd like to thank Mayor Malloy for welcoming us here to Stamford.
I'm glad to be here. And I thank Mayor Ganim from Bridgeport. I think
he's here. And Governor Howard Dean from Vermont came in with me today,
and we're going on from here to New Hampshire and Maine. And thank you,
Governor.
And I want to say a special word of thanks to Connecticut's
remarkable United States Senators, Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman who are
here to my right. Thank you very much. Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman are
two of the happiest people in the country with this announcement today
of these 2,500 plus leaders of American business supporting our
campaign--a few hundred here today--people from all 50 States. We have
people from 35 States here today, even people who came all the way from
Alaska to be here. I thank you.
They are--I say that Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman are the happiest
people because they, like I, have wondered for years why the Democratic
Party should not have at least as much or more support from American
business as the other party. And we never thought that being or helping
ordinary people live up to their full potential was incon-
[[Page 2000]]
sistent with trying to build a strong business environment. In fact, I
thought it was a precondition for helping people to live out their
dreams.
This is a country with a strong private economy. And if it doesn't
work, then our aspirations for all the people we want to help can never,
never, never be fulfilled by anything the Government does. If there is
not an effective partnership that is founded on a successful private
economy, the rest of our endeavors are doomed to be thwarted.
And so, Chris, as chairman of our party, and to my longtime friend
Joe Lieberman as the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council,
which has been an engine of such a bevy of good ideas to move our
country forward--I want to thank both of you for your work, and this is
your achievement today. Thank you.
I was thinking when I was listening to George and Paul and Bill and
Carolyn talk, and then I was looking at the people out here in the crowd
that I know and the people here behind me--we have the heads of great
corporations here, the biggest companies in the country. We have people
here who represent cutting edge companies who are developing new
frontiers of knowledge. We have people here doing old-fashioned American
work better than it has ever been done before. We have people here in
this audience who come from long lines of American business families who
have, generation after generation, been prominent in the American free
enterprise system. We have people here like Carolyn, who started with
nothing, or my friend Katie Hancock who started out of her kitchen in
Arizona in 1981, a long distance company. And all different--we have
American immigrants back here. We have African-Americans, Hispanic-
Americans, people who came to this country without a penny in their
pocket.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who lives in
Florida, who has--I believe he's got 10 children now, who came to the
United States from the Philippines with one dollar and now has quite a
few more. [Laughter] Thanks to--he had an idea and turned it into a
business and gave opportunity to people.
I wrote about some of these businesses in my book, and I talk about
them all along, but you see here today how our country works at its
best. This country is better off than it was 4 years ago not because of
anything any of us did alone, including the President. Our job is to
create the conditions and to try to give people the tools to make the
most of their own lives, and we have done our best to do that.
But you can see what happens when we all work together. And that is
my commitment to you, to do that for 4 more years, to try to build that
bridge to the 21st century.
I had a simple strategy. Bill said he liked it when someone has a
simple strategy and goals and all that. I believe that a country, just
like a company, big, small, or medium-sized, has got to have an
animating vision and a strategy for carrying out that vision and some
way of having benchmarks along the way to see if you're doing what you
ought to be doing, and not just on economic issues but also on social
issues.
One of the things that struck me when I traveled the country in 1991
and 1992 was how many people had just sort of given up on dealing with
our social problems. They just sort of thought: Well, that's just sort
of the transaction cost of being in America in the 1990's: high crime,
intractable welfare problems, exploding out-of-wedlock birth rates. This
is part of being American, part of being in this world; it's not just
our country, it's every place else, nothing to be done about this.
And I basically don't believe that. I think all--just as I know the
Bible tells us we'll have problems until the end of time because of
flaws in human nature, I believe that. But I also believe we at least
ought to be given new problems. [Laughter] I want my successors to have
a new set of challenges to deal with.
And so we had an economic strategy to keep the American dream alive
for everybody who was responsible, to keep our country the strongest
force in the world, to bring our people together and a stronger sense of
community so that we'll be strengthened by our diversity, when every day
all you have to do is pick up the paper or watch the evening news to see
that differences among people,
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racial, ethnic, religious, and other differences, are tearing the heart
out of societies and regions all around the world.
In America we're turning all those differences to our advantage. And
I think more and more we're getting comfortable with the fact that we
are more than ever still a nation of immigrants and that there are more
immigrants from more different places and that we have these
differences. And it's a great asset in a global economy that we're all
so different. As long as we share a common set of values and we show up
every day and do the right thing--it's in a way our meal ticket to the
future.
And the strategy we have pursued to try to expand opportunity, to
try to tackle our social problems and generate more responsibility, and
to keep building that American community, and then reaching out to the
rest of the world, has worked.
My economic benchmarks were cut the deficit in half, see if we can't
have 8 million jobs. We wound up with a 60 percent cut in the deficit
and 10\1/2\ million jobs, thanks to you and people like you all across
the country. And I thank you for that.
And I'd like to point out that we have--of these new jobs, the
largest percentage of these jobs are private sector jobs--93 percent--
than any recovery since the end of World War II--fewer Government jobs,
more private jobs, any recovery since World War II. The Federal
Government is about 250,000 smaller, just under 250,000. State and local
governments have grown, but overall, the net contribution to those 10\1/
2\ million jobs from the Government sector is 7 percent. Your
contribution is 93 percent. And that's because, in no small measure, we
are now adopting a lot of the techniques, improved productivity that
many of you have incorporated over time. So we're moving in the right
direction.
We have expanded exports to historic levels with 200 trade
agreements, 21 with Japan alone. And they make a difference. We have
worked to try to help create more success stories like Carolyn. When I
became President the expensing provisions for small businesses were
$10,000 a year. They're $25,000 now. If you're just starting that's a
whole lot of money. It makes a big difference if you have to invest more
when you're just starting out.
We've reformed the pension laws as the White House Conference on
Small Business asked us to do to make it easier for people to take out
401(k) plans and then for the employees of small businesses to carry it
around job to job with them in a way that doesn't discriminate against
employers if they let them bring those plans with them. A very important
issue.
We made the health insurance premiums more deductible for self-
employed people. And we're moving to do some other things that I believe
will make health insurance more affordable. So these things are
important.
The Small Business Administration cut its budget and doubled the
loan volume. And I'm proud of that. And I might add--we had a huge
increase--we have increased loans to people in all categories. We had
big increases in loans to women and minority business owners, and we
didn't change the standards a bit. We just went out and looked for
people who were good people who had good ideas and tried to make sure
they had a good chance to compete.
So we have more to do. We were visiting before I came out here. One
of the people up here on the stage, John Correnti from Nucor, said,
``Remember, the only thing I ever asked of you was low interest rates.
I'll do the rest.'' [Laughter] He's laughing back there, but it's true.
In order to do that we've got to continue this work on balancing the
budget. We have to do it in the right way.
There are others here who need in that balanced budget a strong
American research budget. We've got another billion dollars in research
in our balanced budget over 7 years. That's an important part of our
future.
Even IBM--we're doing a joint project with IBM. Some of you have
heard me say this before: We're going to build a supercomputer that will
do more calculations in a second than you can do with a hand-held
calculator in 30,000 years. This dilemma about do you trust the
Government or the people, that's not it. The Government is just the
people, acting together--just the people acting together.
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There are some things that we can do better together than we can do
alone. We can't expect a lot of these initial investments to be made
without Government research. The Internet is the product of a publicly
funded research effort now being turned over to the private sector, as
it should be. We don't know how to run things like that, but the initial
research, the ideas, the development should be done with a contribution
from the public sector where it's appropriate. The same thing is true in
medical research, a lot of other areas. So we've got to keep doing that,
and I feel very strongly that we can.
Let me just say a word about the whole litany of other issues I've
told you about--the social problems--to get to the welfare issue that I
wanted to talk about today. I went around the country and discovered
that there were lots of places where the crime rate was going down, not
going up. But it was going down for some very simple and straightforward
reasons. The police were going back to the streets again and not staying
in their cars. They were working with neighborhoods. They knew kids on
the street. They were preventing crime. They were being deployed in ways
that prevented crime more and caught criminals quicker. And they wanted
some help.
And the crime bill of '94 was designed to put another 100,000 police
on the streets because in the previous 30 years, violent crime had
tripled as our population had gone up and got more violent. But we'd
only increased our police forces by 10 percent, and we hadn't redeployed
them. And because there were not enough of them, they were increasingly
driving around in cars, isolated from the action.
So that's what the crime bill was all about, to increase the police
forces by 20 percent, to put the police out there to prevent crime, and
the assault weapons ban, the Brady bill, and all the rest. And it's
working and that's--so we're recontributing to a nationwide
determination to get the crime rate down.
We're now trying to get a million more volunteers, citizens to work
in citizen patrols. And a lot of the people in the telecommunications
business had offered us phones for citizens patrols to go out there and
work with the police.
San Diego, California, where our next debate is, you'd think they
would have terrible problems with crime. It's right there on the border,
and we do a lot of work to stem illegal immigration--the fifth lowest
crime rate of any major city in America, partly because they have huge
numbers of retirees in citizens patrols, working those neighborhoods in
partnership with the police, protecting the kids, going forward. So we
can do something about that.
The teen pregnancy rate has gone down for 4 years in a row and out-
of-wedlock pregnancies as a whole dropped in 1995 for the first time in
20 years because of local grassroots community efforts that are working.
So these things can be done. One good evidence that the private
sector, too, is contributing to this, I might add, was the census report
on the economy that comes out every year. And last week we learned that
in 1995, for the first time in a long while, all classes of working
people, without regard to their incomes, had an increase in their
income. And that represented the biggest decline in income inequality
among working people in the United States in 27 years. That's a tribute
to the business sector working to let people share in the growth of the
economy.
So I say this to set this welfare issue up. It is not true that you
can't do anything about social problems. That is not true. And we have
to, first of all, say to everyone in America, get that out of your mind.
Now, it is also not true that you can ask people in business to make
their primary mission solving a social problem if it is inconsistent
with the mission of business.
Here is the welfare dilemma; I worked on welfare reform for 16
years. I've been in welfare offices. I've talked to lots of folks on
welfare. I've talked to people who work with people on welfare. They all
pretty much say what Carolyn said. Nearly everybody who is on it wants
to be off. Nearly everybody who is not working is willing to work. But
what's happened is that the fundamental nature of the population on
welfare is very different from what it was 60 years ago when that
program started. And now we live in a society where most people work and
most parents work even when their children are young. And most people on
welfare have become
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increasingly unemployable and isolated from the rest of us. At least
that's true for about half of them.
Now, in the last 4 years, the welfare rolls have gone down by almost
2 million, because we've worked with people like Governor Dean, who is
here, with the Governors. We've had--43 States have established new
partnerships with the Federal Government, to get out from under outdated
rules, to change the welfare system to meet the needs of the new
population, to move people from welfare to work. That, plus a growing
economy, helped us to reduce the welfare rolls by 2 million.
Now we're left with people like the folks that Carolyn works with in
Georgia. And we have to make greater efforts. I signed the welfare
reform bill amidst great controversy. You all know it was very
controversial. I vetoed the first two bills because they took the--one
of them took the guarantee of Medicaid coverage, the health care
coverage, away from families on welfare, which I thought was a mistake,
and messed with the school lunch program. They both did that, and I
thought it was wrong.
The third bill did not do that. Here's what it does. Here's what the
bill that I signed does. It says, in this new system the National
Government will continue to guarantee health care for poor families and
nutrition and, if the welfare recipient goes to work, more money for
child care than ever before. You heard her say that's a big problem. But
what used to be the welfare check--the welfare check now goes to people
once a month; it's part Federal money, part State money. What used to be
the welfare check, we're going to send the Federal portion of that to
the States and say, ``You can decide how to spend this. You have 2 years
for all the able-bodied people on welfare to turn that welfare check
into a paycheck.'' That's what it says.
Now, the people who criticized me for signing it say that it will
never happen and we can't do anything about it, and you're consigning
these poor people to more poverty, and you're going to hurt the kids. I
just honestly disagree with that. But I will tell you this: If we all
lay down on the job, the new system will be worse for some poor people
and their children than the old system. The problem is that the old
system had limits on it. There are always going to be a certain core of
people who are able-bodied who were never brought into the mainstream of
society and who were left in what is an increasingly physical isolation
from the rest of mainstream society. And it's wrong. And their kids were
never going to get the chance they deserved. They were never going to
have the future they deserved. And we were going to see a lot of people
who never became part of the American mainstream.
And this new system, if we do it right, gives us the chance to do
what we should have done all along, which is to take poverty out of
politics and turn welfare into not just a State-based but a community-
based program where people are dealt with as people.
All these folks are different. They have different abilities. They
have different problems. They have different hurdles to overcome. And we
should have--in Stamford, Connecticut, or Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I
graduated from high school, or any other place in the country--a
community-based welfare program where the employers of the community,
the churches, all the people who are interested in this are all working
together. And everybody who gets a check knows that if they're able-
bodied they've got to go to work if there's a job there. That's what we
ought to have as a community-based program.
So here's the trick. How do you do that when you know that the
Government still has a deficit, and we can't create enough public
service jobs to hire these folks? So they have to be hired in the
private sector. And I can ask you to help, but I can't ask you to do
anything that undermines your own fundamental mission, which is to make
your business a success.
That is what I want to talk about just a moment today because the
welfare reform bill was just the first step. We now have to figure out
how to reform welfare. That's very different than passing a bill. We
actually have to go out and do it. And while the States and the
communities will be able to do a lot of this, we still have certain
responsibilities, one I am attempting to meet by giving special tax
credits to people who hire people off welfare and keep them hired for a
year.
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And we think that will help to move people, a million people, from
welfare to work.
But let me also say that I'm particularly glad that Bill Esrey is
here today, and one person who wanted to be here and couldn't is Bob
Shapiro from Monsanto, because they have worked in Missouri with a
program in Kansas City that I believe is what we ought to do everywhere.
And that's why I've been going around challenging every business person
who ever cussed out the welfare system to go see the Governor, go see
the mayor, work out a system where business can participate in putting
people back to work in ways that don't hurt the business.
How can we do it? My answer is, look at Kansas City. What they did
was--and we gave them permission to do this; they had to change a lot of
Federal rules. In Kansas City, they have a full employment council. They
have one building where they do adult education, process people on
welfare, deal with social problems, the whole nine yards. Business
people, church people, welfare people--everybody in the community is
represented on this council.
Here's what we did to change the rules. They will give any employer
who will hire someone new the welfare check for 4 years. If you hire
somebody off welfare, you've got to pay them a minimum income that's
over the minimum wage--I don't know exactly what it is now; it started
out at $6 an hour--but we'll give you the welfare check. So let's assume
the welfare check is worth $2.50 an hour; that's your premium for
training people, for finding out what their problems are, for helping
make sure their kids are going to be all right, for dealing with all of
those things, and maybe dealing with somebody who has never been in the
work force before and literally doesn't even know such elemental things
as how to show up on time and do basic things. But this is it; you get
it.
We're not asking you to do this totally out of the goodness of your
heart. You take the welfare check, and you become the trainer. Now,
consider what this will do. This means there won't be any big programs
where you're gathering huge numbers of people; instead, you will be
integrating people into the mainstream of American life. And if every
business in the country, every church of any size in the country, every
nonprofit in the country, everybody just hired one person, this problem
would go away.
And then in future times, when the economy goes down and we have
recessions, everybody would be treated the same. Unemployed people would
just be unemployed people. They'd be in a tough time. We'd take care of
them until the economy got going again. But there wouldn't be this
separate class of people isolated as people on welfare unless they had
some disability that prevented them from being in the mainstream. We
wouldn't be isolating them anymore.
This is important. There are other things that can be done. There
are some people who are represented here who have made investments in
areas specifically so they could hire a disproportionate number of poor
people. I know Eric Sklar of Burrito Brothers is doing that in the
Washington area. Sandy Weill has a great program at Travelers, called
the academy of finance, which is designed in part to train people who
might become welfare recipients to stay off of it in the first place.
But I'm telling you, this is a problem we can solve. This is not
rocket science. There is X number of people on welfare who never seem to
get off but who are physically and mentally able to work. Maybe they
need substance abuse treatment. Maybe they need job training. Maybe they
need something else. But now they're not categories anymore, they're
people living in certain communities. And no one has an excuse anymore.
And all you need, if you want to participate in this, is to make
sure that your Governors and your community leaders and your legislators
make it possible for you to do what the business community can now do in
a place like Kansas City. That's all you need to do.
I met--Bill and I were in Kansas City the other day with a guy that
had 25 employees. It's a great small business story. He stored data for
the Federal Government. And he won all these competitive bid contracts--
25 employees. Five of them were former welfare recipients he had hired.
And the way the Missouri program works is you have to promise to keep
one person for a year unless they're really bad--they have to do
something terrible--and then you don't have to
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keep somebody if they're just unemployable. But you can keep one person
in a job slot for up to 4 years and get the welfare check.
However, you can keep the slot for 10 years. So if you can promote
them up or they can go on to other jobs or whatever, you might do 10
people in one job slot. But it's a manageable thing, don't you see, in a
big country like ours, with all of these different employment units and
all of these different sizes--this is a manageable thing. We can do
this.
And think how we'll feel if there's no politics in poverty. Think
how we'll feel if we know that we treat everybody the same. And sure, at
any given time in our country's life, there will always be some people
out of work. But there won't be this separate class of people who
literally we have isolated and hurt terribly by not imposing more
responsibility and giving more opportunity to, and their kids.
This is a huge deal. But let me say--I will say again, only the
private sector in America can prove that I was right to sign that bill,
and those who thought I was wrong were wrong. The Government cannot hire
all of these people. We still have a deficit. We're going to give the
communities some funds, if my next budget prevails--some funds so that
communities can help. There are all kinds of things that need to be done
in communities that can help in the short run as we go through a
transition. But this has basically got to be a private sector show.
So that's the last point I want to make today. I am very gratified
that every person here, every one of these executives has promised to do
what they can to help us meet this national challenge. I thank you for
that. And I want you to help me get more executives, more businesses in
every community in the country to do it.
Thank you. Thank you, and God bless you all.
Note: The President spoke at 11:45 a.m. at the Rich Forum. In his
remarks, he referred to Carolyn Straddle, president, CLS Paving; Bill
Esrey, chairman and chief executive officer, Sprint Corp.; Paul Allaire,
chairman and chief executive officer, Xerox Corp.; George David,
chairman, United Technologies; Mayor Dannel P. Malloy of Stamford, CT;
Mayor Joseph P. Ganim of Bridgeport, CT; John Correnti, president,
Nucor; Eric Sklar, chief executive officer, Burrito Brothers, Inc.; and
Sandy Weill, chairman and chief executive officer, The Travelers Group,
Inc. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because the tape
was incomplete.