Remarks on the first anniversary of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 in White Plains, Maryland

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 22, 1995

For example, there's been a remarkable amount of bipartisan support in the United States Congress and in the administration on what the defense budget ought to be at the end of the cold war. Everybody knows it has to go down, and everybody knows it shouldn't go down too much because every time in our history we've taken it down too much, we have wound up getting ourselves in trouble, and we have to build it up all over again. Better to spend enough money to maintain the strongest military in the world to prevent bad things from happening. So we argue a little bit around the edges, but more or less we are moving in the same direction, because we understand that's important to our security. The same thing could be said today about the other problems we have.

We have two big deficits in America today. We've got a huge Government deficit - a budget deficit. But we also have an education and training deficit. And we can't solve one without the other. We ought to bring both into balance. We ought to get rid of both deficits. And I think we can.

In the last 2 years, we've made a remarkable amount of progress. Over a 7-year period, the budgets that were adopted in the last couple of years reduced the deficit by $1 trillion. Your budget deficit would be gone today, we would be in balance today, were it not for the interest we have to pay on the debt we ran up in just the 12 years before I took office. So this is a - what I want to say to you is that this idea of having a big structural deficit in America with our budget is a new idea, but it didn't happen overnight. And we can't solve it overnight, but we have to solve it. And we are moving on it, and we will continue to do so.

We also see in the last 2 years, thanks to Senator Kennedy and others, a remarkable bipartisan assault on the education deficit: big increase in Head Start, the Goals 2000 initiative, which is designed to see that more of our schools meet really high standards and that we measure them and tell people the truth about how our schools are doing, but that we help our schools to achieve those standards through grassroots reforms. We've reformed the student loan program, to lower the cost of college loans, make the repayment terms easier but be tougher on collecting the bills so that the defaults have gone from $2.8 billion a year down to $1 billion a year, but we're making more loans to more young people at lower costs. Those are the kinds of things that we did all in a bipartisan manner.

Now we've asked the Congress to collapse a lot of these training programs into a big voucher so that when someone loses a job or if someone's working for a very low wage and they need to go back to the community college or participate in a program like this, they can just get a voucher from the Government and use it for 2 years to get training throughout a lifetime. Because all of you who are in this program, you'll have to continue to upgrade your skills over the course of your working life if the objective is to have good jobs, good jobs, good jobs. These are all things that we have been doing together and we need to continue to do it.