Ron Brown outlines principles Clinton used in bold economic plan

Jet, March 15, 1993

The nation's first Black Secretary of Commerce, Atty. Ronald H. (Ron) Brown, who presides over 36,000 employees and a $3.5 billion budget, recently outlined for Jet the principles President Clinton used to come up with his bold economic recovery plan.

During a recent visit to Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) headquarters in Chicago, Brown, a key member of the White House team seeking support of President Clinton's economic plan, told the 16 members of the editorial board of Jet and Ebony Magazines "the President wanted a recovery plan which would honestly and effectively help the nation's economy."

The editorial board convened the meeting on the 10th floor in a conference room, where Brown discussed the new economic order and then answered questions on a variety of topics.

He said the President was chiefly concerned that during the Reagan/Bush presidential administrations of the 1980s "the rich got richer, the poor got poorer and the middle class got squeezed beyond belief" It was also his concern that "there was no longer any real commitment in America to the principal concerns of African Americans, other minority Americans ... that they had been left out of the participation in the fruits of our economy."

He noted that it was this same concern that prompted Clinton to appoint four Blacks to his Cabinet - which is unprecedented in the entire history of America - and that all of them were involved in his deliberations about changing America by first changing the economy.

The commerce secretary, who is on the President's Economic Council said Clinton's bold economic plan includes four principles:

1) "We needed to have a bold plan to affect change."

2) "We needed to be honest and straight forward - no smoke and mirrors."

3) "The plan had to be comprehensive!"

4) "It had to be something that folks could understand." The Harvard Law School,graduate and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee emphasized that it was important that when "we were putting the plan together we had to be consciously concerned about what is its impact on employment? What is its impact on jobs? That's something that generally had not taken place in those kinds of discussions before."

He continued:

"It was all about fiscal and monetary policies - not a lot of highfalutin economics... It was about how does this affect the real lives of real people?" He said the Economic Council had to put a new column on the OMB (Office Management of Budget) for discussion purposes. "There was never a jobs impact column before - how many jobs does it create? How many jobs does it lose?" he said.

Brown noted that "the President insisted that the economic plan would answer these questions: What is the distributive impact the decisions would make? Who is helped? Who is hurt?"

The "economic stimulus package" that President Clinton has put together "will involve both the private and public sectors in creating jobs to insure long-term economic growth," Brown emphasized.

The former National Urban League executive said that it was also imperative that "we do something about the deficit." He pointed out, "When Ronald Reagan came to office [as President in 1980], the debt was $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) and now its $4,000,000,000,000 (four trillion dollars)."

The secretary of commerce warned that the President's plan "includes some pain, but he wants it distributed fairly, with the poorest feeling it the least...

"President Clinton believes that people can accept bad news," he said. "They can accept making contributions. They can accept sacrifice if they think it's fair; if they think it's rational; if they think some short-term pain can mean some long-term prosperity; if they think this is not only being done in our interest, but in the interest of our children and our grandchildren."

Before concluding the press conference, Commerce Secretary Brown briefly described his duties and the scope of his Cabinet position. He said:

"It is really a department with an unbelievable broad reach. It is probably the only department in our government that has as broad a reach internationally as it has domestically." He explained:

"There is a Bureau of Export Control, which controls what we can sell elsewhere. It makes decisions whether you can sell a computer in China with dual-use technologies - for military and civilian purposes. There's the International Trade Administration, which is the main trade enforcement arm and trade promotion arm of the federal government. I chair the Inter-Agency Trade Promotion Coordinating Council. As secretary of commerce, I'm responsible for trade promotions for America. There is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Department's ($3 1/2 billion) budget. This is big stuff - oceanic and atmospheric surveys ... There are all kinds of environmental technologies. For example, we put in the new weather station in South Florida to replace the one blown away by the recent hurricane...

"There is the Economic Development and the Minority Business Administration ... There is the U.S. Foreign and Commercial Services.