Remarks in Vancouver, Washington

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 23, 1996

Folks, we're moving in the right direction. And I want to ask you to help me build a bridge to the 21st century where we keep cleaning up the environment, where we keep bringing crime down. If we bring it down 8 years in a row instead of 4, it'll be about low enough so we'll actually be surprised when we see a crime on the evening news at night and our children will be safe on the streets.

I want you to help me to keep building strong families. One of the most interesting issues of this election is that the first bill I signed when I became President was a bill, again, which was opposed by my opponent and Speaker Gingrich. They led the opposition to it, the family and medical leave law. They said it was bad for business, bad for business to say you could have a little time off when your baby is born, or your parent's sick, without losing your job. We did it. Twelve million families have taken advantage of it, and 10 1/2 million jobs later, we know it was good for business. America is stronger when we can raise our children and work and succeed at the same time.

So I want you to help me do better. I'd like to see people be able to take a little time off to go to their children's regular meetings with their teachers, the parent-teacher conferences, and take their folks to medical appointments, and we'll be stronger because of it. Will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause]

I want to build a bridge to the 21st century where we keep this economy growing, where we expand trade even more. Washington State - because we've had over 200 separate trade agreements, the people of Washington are selling more airplanes, more computer software, and apples from Washington for the first time all the way in Japan. We need more of that, and I will give you more of it.

We need to balance the budget, and we can cut taxes. But we only can cut the taxes that we can pay for balancing the budget. Why? Because when we bring this deficit down, it keeps interest rates down; it means your car payment, your credit card payment, your house payments are lower; it means businesses can borrow money to hire people to grow the economy. We have to continue.

We cannot have a tax cut that's so big that we have to have the Government start borrowing more money again to drive up your interest rates. Somebody gives you that kind of a tax cut to go take it right back out in higher interest rates for credit cards, car payments, and home mortgages, and businesses won't be growing again.

So yes, let's cut taxes for education, for childrearing, for medical care, for buying that first-time home. Let's don't charge people a tax on the gain when they sell their homes, but let's pay for it in a balanced budget. Let's do that.

Finally, let me remind you what is at stake. We also have to balance the budget without undermining our commitments to education, to the environment, to Medicaid's commitment to little children, to the seniors in nursing homes, the families with disabilities, most of them middle class families, without creating a two-tier system of Medicare that will be unfair to our seniors. We can do that, folks, without walking away from research.