Remarks to the community in Billings

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 5, 1995

Tomorrow, I'm going to have a townhall meeting here, and we're going to bring in all kinds of people with things they want to say about what they think the National Government should be doing, and a bunch of them are going to say things they think we ought to stop doing, and I'm just going to listen and then try to respond.

Tonight, what I'd like to do is to tell you a little bit about why I ran for President and what I've tried to do, where we are now, and some things that are going on in Washington that I think very much affect you and your future. And I want you to think about it and then just tell your elected representatives what you think about it. I wish it were possible for this kind of atmosphere to be recreated all across America and for people to see and feel the kind of informal communication and openness that I feel here.

I ran for this job because, frankly, I was worried about the direction of our country, and in 1992 we were in a recession. We'd had the lowest job growth rate since the Depression. We'd had almost 15 years then - actually more - of stagnant incomes for most Americans. I can now tell you that for the last 15 years, 60 percent of the American people are working longer every week for the same or lower incomes they were making 15 years ago. And we kept piling up a big national debt and at the same time reducing our investments in the things that make us richer and stronger, like education and technology and things that grow the economy and finding a way to preserve the environment and still permit economic opportunity to flourish.

And I went to Washington with some pretty simple goals. I wanted to get our economic house in order so we could grow the middle class and shrink the under class. I wanted to see us face problems that had been long ignored, like the deficit problem and the crime problem in many of our high crime areas. I wanted to find a way to promote environmental protection and economic growth. I wanted to give the American people a system of education and human investment that would permit people to make the most of their own lives, whether they were moving from welfare to work or we were just giving everybody a better chance to go on to college or providing apprenticeship programs for young people who didn't go to 4-year schools but did want to have good jobs. And I wanted to shrink and reorganize the Federal Government so we could give more decisions back to State and local governments and private citizens but so that we could do what we have to do in Washington well and give you greater confidence in doing it. That's why I went there.

In the last 2 years, we have made, I think, some remarkable progress in changing the circumstances in Washington, less progress in changing the circumstances in people's lives in America because when a country gets going in one direction for 10 or 20 years, it's hard to turn it on a dime. But let me just give you a little bit of a progress report.

To use the 7-year figure now favored by the Republican majority in Congress, the budgets we adopted in 1993 and '94 reduced the deficit by $1 trillion over 7 years, 3 years in a row, for the first time since Harry Truman was President. So much so - I want you to understand, we've still got a big deficit problem, but the Federal budget would be in balance today - today - but for the interest we have to pay on the debt that was run up in the 12 years before I moved to Washington. So we've made a good beginning on the deficit.