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Remarks at a fundraiser for Texas senatorial candidate Richard Fisher
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, July 25, 1994
But by the narrowest of margins, Congress voted for $255 billion in spending cuts; tax cuts for 15 million working American families; a tax increase for only 1.5 percent of us, including a lot of us in this room--[laughter]--that went to pay down the deficit; a tax break for 90 percent of the small businesses in this country; lower interest rates on college loans for 20 million American students; and a bill that will give us 3 years of deficit reduction for the first time since Harry Truman was President; a bill that reduces the size of the Federal bureaucracy, that the Republicans always scream about, by 250,000, and by 1999, we'll have the smallest Federal Government that we've had since John Kennedy was President--the first time it's gone below 2 million--100 percent from votes of Democrats.
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And what was the result: 3.8 million new jobs; a 1.7 percent in the unemployment rate; the largest number of new business incorporations last year of any year since the end of World War II; and the first quarter of this year, the first quarter in 16 years there was no bank failure. I plead guilty for fighting for that. It was good for Texas, and I'd like to have some help from people who believed in it.
Now, I'm telling you I have pleaded for bipartisan cooperation in a lot of ways, but they want to go out and use that old tax and spend rhetoric. You just cheek your hip pocket, folks. It is time. America has got to lead the world into the 21st century. We have difficult challenges ahead. We've got a crime bill to pass here. We've got welfare reform to pass here. We have to come to grips with health care.
I just got back from a trip to Europe in which I had three large meetings with American service families, enthusiastic Americans serving our country overseas, willing to put their lives on the line for you. And do you know in all three meetings, those people only asked me about one issue, health care. They're afraid they're going to be sent home after serving our country abroad to a country in which they won't have health insurance for their children. They know we spend more on health care than anybody else in the world. We're the only country in the world that can't figure out what to do about it.
Now, Hawaii figured out what to do about it. They adopted the solution Secretary Bent-sen's always advocating: let employers and employees split the burden, buy private insurance, cover everybody. In Hawaii insurance costs small business 30 percent less than it does in the rest of the country; everybody's covered; and people are healthier. We've got to do something about this, folks.
I went to the Governors' conference today and the Republican leader of the Senate was there, and he said he was willing to work all through August, which I took as a significant olive branch, and all through September and all through October. And I am too, all day and all night long. But if we don't do something about this, what's going to happen to the Federal Government is we'll cut defense too much, we won't be able to invest what we ought in our children's future and our education and training and building the economy tomorrow. And being in the Senate and House is going to be a matter of writing cheeks for health care because that's the only thing that's going up. Everything else is going down--and not to buy new health care but just more for the same. We can't do it.
