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

I'll give you another example: There are also, in this tax bill that I have asked the Congress to pass, there are also big incentives for small businesses and big businesses to reinvest their money to put Americans to work and special programs to induce people to invest in communities that are particularly depressed, more sweeping than anything anybody's ever offered.

Why? Because the Government can't put everybody to work. Most people work in the private sector, and that's as it should be. So we have to find ways to give people special incentives to reinvest their money.

Let's take, for example, a business. If a business goes out and refinances its business loan and gets a lower interest rate, what do you want them to do with the money? Open another business, right? Or expand the business they're doing and hire more people so we can get unemployment down.

So those are the kinds of things we're trying to do. The budget I've asked the Congress to pass has over 200 specific budget cuts. It's got some really tough things in it. We freezed Federal employee pay. We reduced the size of the Federal work force by 150,000 over the next 5 years by attrition, just by not hiring people as vacancies occur. We cut everything from agriculture subsidies to Medicare. We cut a lot of things, starting with the White House staff and the administrative cost of the Federal Government.

We raised the money that I talked about. But we have some targeted increases in investment. So while we're going to bring the deficit down dramatically, we're going to try to get some money for more funds for dislocated workers, more funds for communities that are hurt by base closings or plants being closed because of defense cutbacks, more funds for things like the Red Line Transit System here, where our administration announced over $1 billion in funding to put people back to work and also to have some more stops in the community.

And the thing I want to say to you is that, if we're going to compete, if you're going to be able to have a good job and we're going to turn this community and this area around, we have to have the discipline to cut the things out we don't need to spend money on, to raise some money in order to bring the deficit down, because that means low interest rates, and that's good for the economy. But we also have to invest in people and technology and jobs. We've got to do that.

You know, I got amused when I was on the way in here, people holding up signs, standing together. One of them said, "Don't spend any more money." And another one said, "Close the border to illegal aliens." In the jobs program I presented to Congress, one of the things we had was enough money to hire a lot more border patrol people. You can't have it both ways. If you're going to hire people, you've got to have the money to hire them. And we're going to have to make these kinds of tough decisions.

So I wanted to come here because all of you know this. If you didn't know this, you wouldn't be here. You have this figured out. I mean, maybe not just like I said it, but you've figured it out. The average 18-year-old going into the work force now is going to change work eight times in a lifetime. Eight times. And whether you can get and keep a job now depends as much on what you can learn tomorrow as it does on what you know today. And that's not going to change. The world will get smaller and smaller and smaller, more and more of our economy will depend upon our ability to compete with people around the world. We'll have to trade more. We'll have to sell more to other countries. We'll have to be able to change constantly over and over and over again. And you really are on the cutting edge of that change.