Remarks at a reception for Representative Sheila Jackson Lee in Houston: January 9, 1998

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 19, 1998

I didn't do all that. You did most of it. I did my job. Our job was to create the conditions and give people the tools to build good lives, good families, good communities, a strong nation, and then to reach out to the rest of the world, recognizing that this is an increasingly interdependent world.

I say this to make a simple point for why it really matters that you're here for Sheila Jackson Lee, apart from the fact that she's a fireball, and you like her. [Laughter] That's good enough reason to show up, but there is a bigger reason. Ideas have consequences in public life, just like they do in the classroom or in novels or in your personal lives. We had an idea that there was a role for Government in public life in the 21st century; that it wasn't inherently bad, but it needed to be smaller and less bureaucratic and more focused on empowerment. And we have a lot of challenges left.

You've still got neighborhoods in Houston where there are people who haven't been helped by this global economy. We've still got places where free enterprise has not found its way in. The biggest untapped market for American goods and services are in the unemployed neighborhoods of America. We've made a lot of progress in education; there are still a lot of under-performing schools. I'm trying to get everybody to go to college, but the first thing you've got to know is when you get out of high school your diploma means what it says, and you can read it, and you know what it means, and you got out of it what you need.

The Congresswoman was trying to delicately side-step the fact that I am the oldest of the baby boomers, but alas, it's true. [Laughter] And when our crowd retires, if we don't now - now - prepare with necessary, prudent reforms in Social Security and Medicare, we will put ourselves in the position of either sacrificing two of the most important accomplishments that have relieved the anxiety from old age and made the elderly people less poor than the rest of us for the first time in history - two fabulous accomplishments - or in order to keep them just like they are, if we're unwilling to change them, we'll have to put a big old tax on our kids that aren't fair and make it harder for them to support their grandchildren. Why? Because there's more of us than there are of them.

This is not a complicated deal. And there's about an 18-year bulge there that we have to get through, after which, because of the childrearing habits of our own children and because of immigration, things will kind of settle out again.

It is irresponsible - I don't know anyone in my generation, anybody in the baby boom generation, who really wants to saddle our kids with an unsustainable economic burden to take care of us in our old age. So we're going to have to make some prudent changes. If we do it now, we're open about it, we don't try to play politics with it, can we do it? We can reduce it nearly to an accounting problem. We'll just do what makes sense and do the commonsense thing and go on. But we have to do it.