Remarks and a question-and-answer session at the Cleveland City Club

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 31, 1994

Well, all this has led to deficit reduction. When I spoke here last year the Federal deficit for 1994, the fiscal year that ended on the last day of September, was estimated to be $305 billion. Today the Treasury has announced its preliminary estimate, $203 billion, $102 billion less than was projected before the plan was passed. The decline in the deficit since 1992 is the largest 2-year decline in our history, and the first time in 20 years the deficit has gone down for 2 years in a row.

Let me go over here and try to illustrate what this means, and I hope this microphone works. It does. That's the technology wizards in our administration having their way.

So you can get a feel for this, the deficit, which was very small in 1979, began going up dramatically. It was at about $60 billion, or $65 billion in 1980, and then it began really rising. It had gone to $220 billion by 1990; you see where it was in 1992. Our budget took quite a bit off of it last year. And what these figures mean is that now we are drawing the line on the deficit down to $200 billion, a dramatic change.

So you can get an idea of the difference, if we hadn't passed that deficit reduction plan last year, the deficit would have been off the charts, up here at $305 billion. And because we did, next year it will be off the charts down here at about $170 billion. And when that happens, it will be the first time that the deficit's gone down 3 years in a row since Harry Truman was the President of the United States. The Congress deserves credit for doing this and helping to lift a burden of debt from our children and helping to free up funds that would otherwise have been consumed in financing Government debt to finance homes and businesses all across the United States.

The second thing I want to emphasize is that the remarkable thing about this budget is that while reducing the deficit and reducing spending, we have actually been able to increase our investments in education and training and technology. We increased Head Start. We increased funds to help all States develop apprenticeship training programs for young people who don't go to college but do want to get good jobs. With the new individual education accounts that I announced on Friday, we are reorganizing the college loan program to provide lower interest loans, lower fees on the loans, longer repayment options for young people who get jobs when they get out of college with modest wages and should not have to pay more than a certain percentage of their income. Over the next few years, this will make 20 million Americans, including almost a million in Ohio, eligible for lower interest, longer term repayment on their college loans. At a time when what you earn depends upon what you can learn, these investments are very, very important for the economic future of the entire United States.

In addition to that, we have increased our investments in defense conversion, including in several sites here in Ohio. This is especially important because defense has come down rather dramatically since 1987, and we had built a huge high-wage, high-tech infrastructure around the defense industries that can make a major contribution to our moving into the 21st century if we have the kind of partnerships to help them make the transition.