Remarks at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 15, 2001

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 workout 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.

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.