Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council in Hyde Park, New York - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 29, 2000

Fourth, we will enable Americans to succeed at work and at home with more support for child care, expanding opportunity for health care coverage, passing a Patients' Bill of Rights, and providing middle class families tax relief to educate their kids, take care of them through child care, take care of their parents if they need long-term care.

Fifth, we will make America the safest big Nation on Earth, with more police, more prevention, more prosecutors, and more effective measures to keep guns away from children and criminals.

Sixth, we will meet the challenge of the aging of America by extending the life of Social Security, strengthening and modernizing Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, and providing a tax cut for long-term care, and helping working families to establish their own retirement accounts so that more Americans have a chance to create wealth.

Next, we will reverse the course of climate change while enhancing rather than eroding economic growth with new technologies and new sources of alternative energy.

Let me just say, when I went back and read the New Orleans Declaration, the one thing I wish we'd made more of is the environment, because we have now proved you can growth the economy and improve the environment. And this is a much more important issue now than it was 10 years ago because of the global impacts of climate change. We must address this. Every Member of Congress here will tell you that a huge portion of decisionmakers in our country and throughout the world--and most troubling, in some of the biggest developing nations--still believe you cannot have economic growth unless you pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Just like these big ideas helped us back in 1990, there is nothing so dangerous as for a people to be in the grip of a big idea that is no longer true. It was once true that you had to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to grow the economy, to build a middle class, make a country rich. It is not true anymore. And there are all kinds of manifestations of this.

The assault that the other party is making on my decision to set aside the roadless acres in the National Forests--the Audubon Society says it's the most important conservation measure in the last 50 years. It's just a--[applause].

I say that not--the applause is nice, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point I'm trying to make is that good people will continue to make bad decisions if they're in the grip of a wrong idea. This is not simply a case of interest groups fighting each other. This is really a question of whether we have honestly come to terms with what the facts are, what the evidence shows about the way economies can and, indeed, should work.

And there's no way in the world we'll be able to convince our friends in India or China, which over the next 30 years will become bigger emitters of greenhouse gases than we are, that they can take a different path to development and that we're not trying to keep them poor, unless we can demonstrate that we have let this idea go and that we have evidence that a different way will work.