Remarks to the Community at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 11, 1995

The question is, how are we going to balance the budget? I have given Congress a plan which recognizes both these fundamental truths: that we have to balance the budget and that we have to provide for education and invest in our young people's future. They are working on a plan that balances the budget, but by their own estimate, only produces weak economic growth in part because it cuts education. In California you have had enough of cutting education. We need to invest more in education, and we can do that.

I hope as strongly as I can say that you're going to see the most productive 90 days we've seen in a long time in Congress. We can balance the budget. We can end welfare as we know it. And we can invest in education and protect the medical care of our elderly and protect our ability to have a safe and clean food supply and environment. We can do all this in a balanced way if we'll work for common ground with common sense. That's what we have to do.

There are some who say that there should be no compromise this autumn, but I say that good people of good will want us to find common ground, want us to find honorable compromise, want us to balance the budget and keep faith with the children of America and their educational needs.

You know, I believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties are committed to an agenda of balancing the budget and investing in education. When I became President and we increased our investment in Head Start and added 50,000 more poor children to the Head Start rolls it had bipartisan support. When we passed the Goals 2000 program to give schools the chance to reform themselves and to get more computers and other technology in the classroom and to have smaller class sizes and higher standards, it had overwhelming bipartisan support. When we began to help the States of this country to set up programs for young people who graduate from high school but don't go to 4-year colleges and still need further education to get good jobs and good wages, a School-to-Work program, it had bipartisan support. When we established the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program to support the message to our young people that if you want to learn, you have a right to learn in safety, and you have to learn without drugs, it had bipartisan support. When we expanded the availability of college loans and scholarships for lower income students and college loans for all students, we lowered the cost and improved the repayment terms, it had bipartisan support. There are young people here with AmeriCorps who are working in the communities of the Valley and earning money to go to college. That program was created with bipartisan support.

Education is not supposed to be a partisan political football, and it should not be when the Congress returns tomorrow. We ought to all stay on the side of education.

I will be urging the Congress to adopt two new education ideas which will help the working families in this valley to provide for their future. Number one, there's going to be a tax cut; the question is, who's going to get it and what's it going to be for? I believe we ought to give a tax cut for working families to have the cost of their education tax deductible after high school: college education, training for technicians, unemployed people. That's the kind of tax cut I think we ought to have.