Remarks to the Granoff Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 28, 2000

Just for example, this past holiday season I bought a couple of Christmas gifts online from members of the Lakota tribe at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, a place that still has an unemployment rate of 70 percent, in a country with an unemployment rate of 4 percent. One of the reasons that their unemployment rate's so high is that they don't want to leave the lands of their ancestors, which are so physically distant from markets and consumers. But information technology can change all that, and in time, I'm convinced, can give us the chance to build a truly national economy as we build a truly global economy.

Business-to-business E-commerce is growing even faster than retail E-commerce. In 3 years, it may reach a staggering $1.3 trillion in the United States alone. Companies moving their operations on-line have found enormous savings. During a--listen to this--during a single hour of bidding in a recent business-to-business auction, the price of printed circuit boards was bid down by 42 percent, saving the ultimate buyer $6.4 million in one bid.

When the Vice President and I first came into office, it was clear to both of us that technology would be an important part of our productivity growth. And we asked ourselves, what should the Government be doing? What is the Government's role in sharpening our high-tech edge to develop and disseminate new technologies?

Well first, we negotiated with our trading partners an historic information technology agreement, which will eliminate tariffs on $600 billion worth of semicomputers, computers, telecommunications equipment, and other high-tech products. We fought for and achieved the first comprehensive telecommunications reform in 60 years. We transferred large blocks of the airwaves from Government to the private sector, which has spawned new digital wireless industries. And thanks to the E-rate, which was part of the Telecommunications Act, Internet discount rates have been given to schools, to hospitals, to libraries in ways that have increased the number of our classrooms connected to the Internet from 3 percent in 1994 to 63 percent in 1999. And soon, we'll have 100 percent of our schools connected, except those that are too old to be wired, and that's a story for another day. But I'm trying to fix that, too.

We've also worked to accelerate R&D at every level, pushing for an extension of the research and experimentation tax credit, increasing our national science and technology budget every single year over the last 7 years.

You know, Dr. Rodin mentioned ENIAC. Nearly all of the information innovation in the entire information age started as long-term research projects beyond the 3 to 5 year time horizons of most corporations and their ability to fund their own research. That is why we have tried so hard to expand the Federal Government's role and why we continue to do so.

So, I think the role of fiscal responsibility was important. The role of technology is profoundly important in explaining not only why we had this recovery but why it's gone on so long and why it's operated so strongly and why it hasn't been overcome by inflation.