Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California - Bill Clinton's speech, May 18, 1993

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 24, 1993

May 18, 1993

The President. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to see all of you here, and I'm glad to have the chance to come. I've had a great time touring some of the facilities and seeing some of the programs that are offered here at this college and meeting some of your fellow students. Everybody here is a student, right?

Audience members. Yes!

The President. Everybody back there? I'm glad to see your president, your chancellor who are here, and Mayor Bradley I see back there. Thank you for coming. And I see we have a number of Members of Congress back there. If you've got anything to ask your Congressman, we've got four or five options back there. Will the Members of Congress stand up? Walter and Xavier and Tony Beilenson, Congressmen, it's good to see you all.

I see several State officials back there--the secretary of state, the State comptroller, the insurance commissioner, Michael Woo, Councilman Michael Woo, my friend, a candidate for mayor. Good for you. Good luck.

That "woo" is interesting, isn't it? Makes a good cheer. I like it.

I want to say to all of you, first of all, I am delighted to be back in California; glad to be back in Los Angeles and to Van Nuys and--|applause~. Yesterday I was in New Mexico, and I was at Los Alamos, and I said Los Angeles. They all hooted. So I promised them when I got here I'd say I was glad to be in Los Alamos. So there, I did it. |Laughter~

I came here for a very specific purpose today, and that is to try to illustrate what the economic efforts that our administration is making will do for you and how your efforts--can we fix this-----

|At this point the microphone malfunctioned.~

-----in the work we're doing to try to turn the California economy around. And I thought that there was really no better place to come than to a college like this where all the people here have already, by definition, taken responsibility for your own future and made a real commitment to do what it takes to be competitive, to develop the skills you need to get a good job, to keep good jobs, and to learn new skills continuously.

I met a very impressive man inside who has got a full-time job, as many of you do, who has been coming back here on his own just to continue to hone his skills, because he says, "What I do requires me to change over and over and over again. So I will always be able to have a good job." And, this is funny, when I was talking to Dan Palmer, who introduced me, he told me that before he was married and began to have children, he was a musician. And he realized that that's not a very solid basis for having job security. I thought about being a musician, too, and I wasn't as good as he was. And I knew I had no job security. So I got into another line of work where I have no job security. |Laughter~ But, anyway, I understand very much that sort of motivation which I imagine got a lot of you in here.

What I wanted to do was to basically just talk a little bit about our national economic efforts and how it affects California and how what you're doing here is essential if we're ever going to turn the economy of the State and Nation around.

First, when I took office, I found, as you know, a Government with an enormous budget deficit. That is, we were running in the red every year, over $300 billion. Our debt had gone as a nation from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. It's hard to even imagine that kind of money in just 12 years. We were a country for 200 years, we ran up $1 trillion worth of debt. Then in 12, we ran up $3 trillion more.

Why? Because we cut taxes and increased spending. And it was fun for a while. It helped California a lot: cut taxes, people had more money in their pocket; increased spending, mostly in defense; put a lot of people to work in plants out here; put a lot of people to work on and around the bases out here.

In the end, it all catches up to you, and you've seen the last few years what happened: the cold war was over; we began to reduce defense; we had no real plan for dealing with it. And what's happened to your tax money is, the deficit keeps going up even though defense has gone down because of the cost of health care, something that won't surprise any of you.

So what I have tried to do is to come up with a plan that would bring our deficit down, give us control of our budget and your future, get interest rates down so people can refinance their homes and their businesses--and I bet you there are people in this audience today who have refinanced their home loans since last November and saved a lot of money doing it, because we're determined to bring interest rates down--and at the same time, while cutting a lot of spending and raising some taxes, almost all of which--well at least well over 70 percent of it comes from people with incomes above $100,000. And we tried to give a tax cut to people with families with incomes under $30,000 so they wouldn't have to pay a tax increase.

But while doing that, there are some things which we should spend some more money on, and I want to talk about them. We ought to spend some more money on having more programs like this. Why? Because you can have the best economic policies in the world, and if the people don't have the training they need to do the jobs in a global economy, good economic policies don't put people to work.