Remarks on the economic plan in Hyde Park, New York - Bill Clinton's speech, February 19, 1993 - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 1, 1993

Now finally, let me say this program exacts no new taxes for the 40-plus percent of our income tax payers whose taxable income is under $30,000. About $20 a year for people at $30,000 goes up to something between $10 and $15 a month, depending on what your purchasing habits are for people at $40,000. Seventy percent of it comes from people whose incomes exceed $100,000.

There are also some other things here I want you to know about. This program has some tax incentives, which is a fancy way for saying tax cuts for people who invest their money: for the next 2 years, an investment tax credit for all businesses in America large and small who increase their rate of investment; then after that, some tax changes asked for by the manufacturing community for bigger businesses that will always encourage investment; and, for the first time, I think, ever, a small business investment tax credit that is a permanent 7-percent investment tax credit for the 90-plus percent of our businesses that operate on $5 million or less in revenues but create most of our new jobs.

This is a very significant thing that will encourage the private sector to invest in job-generating activities and very important, because in every year of the 1980's, big business lost employment and small business overcame it with more new jobs; but for the last 2 1/2 years small business has not been creating enough jobs to offset the losses in big business. So we've got to reverse that.

There's one final point I want to make as strongly as I can about this. Our plan will bring the deficit down dramatically over the next 4 years. In the fourth year, it will be $140 billion a year lower than it would otherwise be. But unless we also tackle the health care crisis this year, the deficits will start going up after that no matter what we do, because the cost of health care is going to overtake every other thing in the budget and swallow it whole, and not for new health care. We will be paying more for the same health care. So there is no more urgent item on our national agenda than getting all the people involved in health care together and trying to hammer it out.

I asked the First Lady, as all of you know, to head a task force on this. She is increasingly less grateful to me for having asked her to do that. |Laughter~ But she's very good at bringing people together on a complex matter and bringing them to conclusions and coming to a clear plan. And we have got to do that, or we can't turn this country's economic health around.

You talk to any major manufacturer and ask them what their biggest problem is. Nine out of ten of them will tell you, "my health care costs." You talk to the steel people and the auto people and ask them, and a lot of them will tell you, "just paying the health care costs of our retirees." So we have to face that.

Now, that's all of the bad news. Now, what's the good news? What are you going to get out of this? A half a million new jobs in the next year and a half in a job stimulus program, and a long-term program to raise our levels of investment and our quality of education and training, to be fairer to the lower income working people and create an environment that moves people from welfare to work, to have policies that really support families who are working and trying to raise children, and to have an investment program that breaks the barriers of new technologies and actually tries to create more new jobs than we are losing every year.