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

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 28, 2000

But our markets work better than most other countries do for entrepreneurs. That's why you have so many people just a couple of years older than most of the undergraduates here who are worth a couple hundred million dollars with their .com companies. It makes all of us who are older think we were in the wrong line of work for a long time. But an idea is not worth anything unless it can be translated in business into an enterprise, and that requires capital.

And finally, I think you have to give a lot of credit to the businesses that restructured in the tough years of the eighties and to the American workers who put a higher premium on their own education and training than ever before and who have been very sophisticated in this economy, asking for pay increases more in line with the increase in earnings of their companies than ever before.

One of the things people used to tell me, when I was an undergraduate in college, was that economic expansions were broken because working people saw the economy growing and they wanted their share of it and they would always ask for more than a growing economy would warrant and that would build inflation into the economy. You haven't seen that here. And it's a tribute to the people who work in America who understand the connection between economic growth of their firms and growth in their own paycheck and earning.

So there's plenty of credit to go around. President Kennedy once said, victory has a thousand fathers; only defeat is an orphan. And I do think it's important to recognize there are many factors in this recovery. But I think they would not have happened; we would not have had it in the first place, had it not been for a responsible fiscal policy. And it clearly would not have gone on as long as it has and the way it has without the information technology revolution.

So the next question is: Can we keep it going, and if so, how? And can we spread the benefits to people in places that have been left behind? I would suggest the following things. The first is, you can't forget what got us here. We have to maintain our fiscal discipline. When I put out my last budget, it was interesting. I figured I got it about right because I was attacked from the left for practicing Coolidge economics, because I want the country to pay its debt down; and I was attacked from the right for investing too much money in education, health care and the environment, and science and research. So I said, "I must be doing this about right." [Laughter]

But let me take the fiscal discipline argument. One of the ways we've continued to grow is to make capital available to the private sector. There's a lot of debt out there now, business debt and personal debt. It doesn't look damaging today because the debt-to-wealth ratio is still very good, because so much wealth has been generated in this economy. But we have to maintain confidence, and we have to keep interest rates down, which means we have to keep paying this debt down.

We could, in effect, pay off all the publicly held debt that the Government has over the next 13 years. That would make America debt free for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President. That's even before I was around--1835. Now, I would argue that in a global economy that's a good deal. Why? That means that your children will have a structure of interest rates lower than what would otherwise be the case. And unless you believe that the process of globalization is somehow reversible and the global capital markets will somehow cease to exist, that has got to be good policy. So that, I think, is the first thing we have to do.