Remarks to the National Education Association in San Francisco, California - Pres William J. Clinton - July 5, 1993 - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, July 12, 1993 by Bill Clinton

And when this program came up in the Senate Finance Committee, a fair program that raises 75 percent of its money from the top 6 percent of the income-earners whose taxes were reduced in the 1980's, and has $250 billion in spending cuts, over 100 cuts of $100 million or more - let me ask you a question that you can take home to the classroom of your community: The other side who kept screaming to America, "This is a tax-and-spend program, and the only problem is spending," had their chance to offer spending cuts in the Senate Finance Committee. How many spending cuts do you suppose they offered over and above the tough cuts that I had taken out of agriculture and veterans and every other program? Zero, that's how many. You couldn't find them when it got to be specific.

Let me tell you, for every $10 of deficit reduction in this plan designed to get interest rates down and spur growth, $5 comes from spending cuts; $3.75 from the upper 6 percent of American earners, as I said, whose taxes were lowered in the 1980's; $1.25 comes from the great middle class with incomes of between $30,000 and $100,000. Families under $30,000 are held harmless, and for the first time in the history of this country, if this program passes, people who work 40 hours a week and have children in their homes will be lifted out of poverty. That's the best incentive to get off and stay off welfare I ever heard. That's what's in this plan, and those are the facts.

I challenge you to embrace this issue with exuberance and joy and optimism. The only thing I question about the end of that beautiful film was when everybody said, "We've got to stick with the President, and it's hard to change." It was almost like a burden to carry. This is like teaching a new class to your students. This is no big-deal. America will change if somebody will tell the people the truth instead of giving them the same old pablum.

In spite of all the cutbacks, this budget does invest more, in Head Start, in immunizations, in family preservation, in college loans, in national service tuition grants, in school-to-work transition, in defense conversion, to help all those people in the Bay area that are going to lose their jobs because of base closings, and in new technologies to create new jobs for the 21st century to take up for all the defense cuts. It sure does, but we still maintain a freeze on overall spending for 5 years because we've cut so much out of other things.

Now, those are the facts. We need your help to get them out. But most importantly, we need America's help to put this country on the right track. This deficit is like a bone in our throat. It is keeping us from investing in our people, in our growth, and in our future. And you can help to take it out by explaining to the American people what the facts are. This is not about labels and slogans. This is not about tax and spend. It's not about borrow and spend, either, which is what we've been doing for the last 12 years.

And it is not enough to reform our economic system. We must reform our schools, our welfare system, our health system, and our political system. We have to be about that, too. And we are. We have to do something for all these people who have been hurt by the base closings and the defense contract cutbacks. Here in the Bay area, the people here took the hardest lick from this, the third round of our base closures. They and the people in South Carolina and the people in a part of New York were hardest hit. It is wrong for us not to do something for them. So we propose to spend over the next 4 years $5 billion to speed up the environmental cleanup, to give preference to job-creating strategies around these base closings, to train people, to empower communities, to let people rebuild their lives in a new peace-oriented society where we still value the people who won the cold war. It is worth the money. We have to do that.