Remarks at Crossroads Middle School in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey - President Bill Clinton - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, August 28, 2000

August 23, 2000

Thank you. Please be seated, everybody. We all appreciated the standing ovation, but you're about to get tired. [Laughter] I am so glad to be here. Let me say, first of all, I thought Malaika Carpenter gave a terrific talk, didn't you? [Applause] I understand her parents, Nancy and Lenny, and her brother Jerren are here. Where are they? Stand up there. You did well.

I'd like to thank Dr. Stewart for welcoming us here, and Dr. Warfel, the principal here. I'd also like to say a special word of appreciation for this terrific band. Weren't they great, this jazz band? [Applause] I mean, they played "Hail To The Chief," and "On Broadway," and "Caravan," and lots of other things, and they did it very, very well. There aren't many middle school bands in America that are that good, I can tell you. And you should be very proud of them. They're really good.

And I'd like to thank the other students that met with me just a few moments ago. And I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to your Representative in Congress, Rush Holt, who is here with me. Since I'm at a school, I can say this. Rush was a university professor for about a decade, an educator, a trained physicist. When he got elected, we all used to kid him that he knew entirely too much to be a politician. We thought it would be a terrible burden. But I can tell you, from my point of view as someone who has worked for 8 years to improve the quality and the availability of opportunity in education, it has been a real joy to have someone like him with the depth of commitment to education that he has demonstrated these last 2 years. It's been wonderful.

Well, we're about to go back to school. And I've always thought of back to school time as sort of a new beginning. It certainly is for the students and the teachers: new students, new books, new school supplies, new faces in the classroom, a time when a lot of parents stop and think again about the role of education in their own children's lives and what they hope will be their children's future. I think it's a good time for our country to do the same. So today I'd like to talk a little bit about what we can do to prepare our schools and our children not just for the new school year but for the new economy of the 21st century.

We are very fortunate in America today to be living in the longest economic expansion in our history, to have 22 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the highest homeownership ever, a 25-year low in the crime rate, a 35-year low in the welfare rolls, with incomes going up and poverty going down. The great--[applause]--thank you. The great debate that I hope our country will have, not only in this election year but in the remaining weeks of this session of Congress, is what are we going to do with this good fortune?

You know, the parents here in the audience can empathize with this. One of the things you learn when you live long enough is that sometimes you make mistakes not because times are so tough but because they're good, and you kind of break your concentration, and you let moments pass by. And anybody that lives over 30 years can think of some time in his or her life when you made a mistake like that.

So this is a very important time for our country. What are we going to do with this good fortune, unprecedented in our whole history? I hope that we will use this time to dream about the future we want for our children and to literally make a list of what we have to do to achieve it. I hope we'll use this time to pay down our debt and get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 to keep interest rates lower and keep the economy going. I think that's a good thing to do.

I hope we'll use this opportunity to create incentives for people to invest in the poor areas that still aren't participating in our recovery. Here in New Jersey, you might find it hard to believe, but there are several Indian reservations in America where the unemployment rate is still over 50 percent, even though the national rate is 4; and inner-city areas and small rural towns. So I hope we'll do that.

I hope we will take this opportunity when we have some money to lengthen the life of Social Security and Medicare, take it out beyond the baby boom generation so that when those of us who are baby boomers retire, we don't bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise our grandchildren, because they shouldn't be prejudiced by the fact that time has taken us into our later years. I hope we'll use this time to provide some needed health care advances, including prescription drug benefits for seniors on Medicare.

But there is nothing more important for us to do if we want to use this moment to build a future of our dreams for our kids than to make sure all of our children get a 21st century education. And that requires both investment and standards in accountability.

It requires us to invest more and demand more. It requires us to do what Vice President Gore and I have been trying to do for 8 years now. We have doubled our investment in education and training. We've expanded college opportunity by more than any time since the GI bill 50 years ago with the student loan program improvements and saved $8 billion for our kids with the HOPE scholarship, which gives every family a $1,500 tax credit on the cost of college tuition--just about covers community college, makes it free in most States in the country. And we're now trying to get the Congress to allow taxpayers to deduct the cost of college tuition up to $10,000 from their tax bill, which will be worth $2,800 a year in lower taxes for families with kids in college.