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

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 31, 1994

Now, this strategy of ours has a lot of critics. When the deficit reduction plan passed, there were speech after speech after speech saying, "Gosh, if we do this the economy will collapse; the deficit will explode; middle class taxpayers will be bankrupted. This will be the end of the world." I heard it all. Then when NAFTA passed we had a different set of critics who said there would be a giant sucking sound--I think that was his phrase"[laughter]--do you all remember that?--to destroy our industry. Well, the economic program passed, and jobs went up, and the deficit went down. Middle class families did not have their tax rates hiked. The wealthiest Americans and corporations with incomes of over $10 million did, but all the money went to deficit reduction. And we built a new partnership with business by things like deregulation of banking and deregulation of intrastates trucking, which saves billions of dollars a year which then can be freed up to invest in this economy.

Since NAFTA passed, exports to Mexico are up 21 percent. The Big Three automakers report their exports are up 500 percent to Mexico. NAFTA isn't a year old and I just got back from Detroit where the biggest problem in Detroit is now complaints by auto workers working overtime. That is a high-class problem.

So that's the strategy; that's what we've done. What are the results? We are in the midst of the first investment-led, low-inflation, productivity-driven economic expansion in over three decades. New businesses are up. Exports are up. Jobs are growing. The deficit is falling. In the last 21 months there have been 4.6 million new jobs in the American economy, 90 percent of them in the private sector. In 1994 something perhaps more fundamental and important has finally begun to happen. More than half the new jobs created by our economy in this year are above average wage, more high-wage jobs in this year than in the previous 5 years combined. And that is good news for the American working people.

Investment in new equipment is 8 times what it was in the last 4 years. And the Federal Government's purchases are down almost 8 percent. This is not a Government-inspired, deficit-driven recovery. This is more enterprise and less Government, better for the long run.

For the first time since 1979 America leads the world in the sales of automobiles. For the first time in a decade we've had 9 months of manufacturing job growth in a row. For the first time in 9 years the annual vote of international economists said America, not Japan, was the most productive economy in the entire world.

Now, you might say, if all that's so, why aren't we happier? [Laughter] Well, partly because the atmosphere in which we operate today is particularly contentious and, I believe, entirely too partisan. Partly because the way we get our information guarantees that we'll know more about our failures than our successes, guarantees that we'll know more about our conflicts than when we cooperate. Partly because we're dealing with long-term problems that haven't really affected a lot of real people's lives yet.