Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr11/wh930513.zip/05-13B.TXT

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From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail]  Thu May 13 17:25:26 1993
Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 13:12-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail],
Subject: President's Remarks to the Cooper Union Community

                         THE WHITE HOUSE

                  Office of the Press Secretary
                       (New York, New York)
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                           May 12, 1993


                     REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                  TO THE COOPER UNION COMMUNITY

                   Cooper Union School for the
                 Advancement of Science and Arts

3:50 P.M. EDT

         THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  It always
seems to be a good thing for me when I'm introduced in New York
by Governor Cuomo.  (Laughter.)  I must confess to having mixed
feelings as I sit on this revered stage with all these
distinguished citizens and President Iselin made his eloquent
remarks and then your fine Mayor spoke so forcefully, and the
brilliant Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee brought us
back to Woodrow Wilson, and then Governor Cuomo once again gave
me gave me a hard act to follow.  (Laughter.)  And they all left
the stage.  (Laughter.)  I thought to myself, pray this is not a
metaphor for the battle ahead.  (Laughter and applause.)

         This is the second thing I have had in common with
President Wilson.  I received a fascinating letter the other day
from Johnston and Murphy -- the shoe manufacturers from
Nashville, Tennessee.  They have made shoes for every President
going back to the 1850s.  So they made a pair of shoes for
President Lincoln.  And they send you a little catalog and you
pick the shoes you want.  And they send them to you with your
name in them; it says "Johnston and Murphy -- every President
served."  And so they -- (laughter) -- and so I ordered these
rather simple plain black shoes, and they wrote me this wonderful
letter in which they said, we're from Nashville, Tennessee, and
we know what's in your heart, so here's an extra pair of shoes.
And they sent me a box of blue suede shoes.  (Laughter.)

         And then, in the letter they recounted the choices
of all the previous Presidents.  And they said that in one way my
choice was not particularly innovative; that five other
Presidents had chosen the same style I did.  (Laughter.)
Including Harry Truman, which made me very proud.  (Laughter.)
But they said, you do have the biggest feet of any President
since Woodrow Wilson.  (Laughter.)  So you had two sets of big
feet here from the Presidents.

         President Wilson said in an address that Senator
Moynihan quoted:  "I have been dealing with young men most of
life."  He wasn't so gender sensitive as he should have been.
"And one of the things I have tried most to impress upon them is
not to stay young too long, but to take themselves seriously."

         Now, at one level I want us all to stay young
forever, but I do think the time has come for us to take
ourselves and our purposes more seriously.  This celebrated
institution and the community of scholars and activists it
embraces is the result, as President Iselin said, of Peter
Cooper's determination more than 130 years ago to create an
institution intellectually vigorous with free tuition, the first
non-discrimination policy in American history, and a genuine
commitment to social justice.  He believed you could do more than
one thing at a time.  (Applause and laughter.)

         Here Mr. Lincoln asked our country to confront the
cost of the spread of slavery.  To ask hard questions about the
conditions that had plagued our nation since its beginning.
Remember it was Thomas Jefferson. not Abraham Lincoln -- Thomas
Jefferson the slave owner who said, "I tremble when I think of
slavery to consider that God is just."  There were people who
knew in their hearts the truth, but had denied it a long time.

         Lincoln said that to continue to do that threatened
to tear our country apart.  He knew the nation would be destroyed
if slavery spread and that, unless the country's drifting
stopped, the very drift would carry within it the seeds of our
destruction.  And so, here at Cooper Union he asked those hard
questions and gave strong answers.  Soon after he won the
nomination of the fledgling Republican Party and went on to win
the presidency by only 39 percent of the popular vote, receiving
virtually no votes south of the Mason-Dixon Line.  Soon after
that the war came and Lincoln's fight for the union grew into a
determination to abolish slavery.

         Several days a week I walk alone into the room in
the White House where Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation
Proclamation and try to remember the purposes of the United
States of America.

         The fight for the Union and the fight against
slavery cost Abraham Lincoln his life, as well as the lives of
hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen.  But America
prevailed in form and spirit.  And America has endured in form
and spirit because in times of crisis and challenge, leaders have
asked the hard questions and given the strong answers, and the
American people have rallied.

         Look at the condition of America today.  How can we
avoid asking those questions?  To be sure, we are still the
strongest nation in the world politically, economically and
militarily.  To be sure, more than anyone else in the world we
have accommodated the incredible diversity of our land with
remarkable harmony.  When you look at what is happening, the
heartbreak in the former Yugoslavia today, where there are three
ethnic groups that genetically have no ethnic differences at all
but call them ethnically different solely because of the
accidents of religion and history.

         It is an incredible tribute that in this country, in
this great city, and across the country -- in Los Angeles and in
all places in between -- that we live together as well as we do
with our diversity.  But still we cannot avoid the hard
questions.

         If we're so great, why are most middle-class
families working longer hours today than they were 20 years ago
for wages that in real terms are less than they were a decade
ago?  Why are one in 10 of our people so impoverished they're on
food stamps?  Why are over 8 million of us out of work if we're
in the 17th month of a recovery?  Why are there over 35 million
of us without health care and millions more Americans terrified
of losing their health coverage, with 100,000 Americans a month
losing their health insurance; and millions of others who can
never change jobs under the current system because they or
someone in their family has been sick, and so they have a
preexisting condition, which makes them unemployable with health
insurance elsewhere?

         Why -- why that half the people on welfare not get
off of it as a safety net after just a few months?  Why is there
a whole class of new poor people, mostly young women and their
little children -- many of those children never born into an
integrated family?  Why was only 35 years ago -- only 35 years
ago, there conditions even in New York City in which there were
three police officers on the street for every violent crime, and
today there are three crimes for every police officer?

         Why does the government fail to deal with the
problems that this age has brought to us and engaged the American
people in dealing with them?  Why have we seen the government's
debt grow from $1 trillion to $4 trillion in the last 12 years,
while we reduced our investment in the people of America and
their promise and their ability to compete?

         Why in the world would we reduce all this defense
spending, including jobs for engineers and scientists and factory
workers, with no plan whatever to put that money back to work to
create opportunities for them cleaning up the environment, or
exploring the frontiers of technology here at home, or helping us
to compete with people all around the world?

         The American economy finds itself in the middle of a
global marketplace, challenged on every hand by nations who have
made wise investments in their people, their workers and their
technological edge.  Yes, there is today a global recession,
which is making our problem more difficult.  But if you take the
long view, those who have made the investments in the '80s and
those who are doing so now will be rewarded over the long run.
For a decade or more, we have both expanded our debt and reduced
our investment in areas key to our future.

         We also have in this country a crisis of belief and
hope.  When President Kennedy took office, younger than I was
when I took office, over 70 percent of the  American people
fundamentally believed that their leaders would tell them the
truth and that their system could succeed.  Now it seems as if
half the people just stand around waiting to be disappointed,
waiting to be told what's wrong and who's failed and how the
special interests once again have strangled the national
interests, and why they should go on about their business without
believing things can be different.

         I believe that the nature of our challenge is this:
We must both restore our economy and restore the confidence of
our people in our democracy.  And I do not believe we can do one
without the other.

         This is a strange and, in a way, wondrous moment in
our history when citizens everywhere desperately want things to
change, but still are wary of it and reluctant to place their
faith in anyone's prescription.  We must begin with the economy.
We must change the way the government works if we expect the
economy to improve.  And we must rebuild the confidence of the
American people based on the three words which were the watch
words of my campaign for President:  more opportunity for all;
more responsibility from all; and the clear understanding that we
are a community and we're all in this together, going up or down
together.  Whether we like it or not, that is clearly the truth.
And we must begin to act as if it were.

         How can we reduce the deficit?  Let's start with the
big problem of the debt.  Well, the answer is not popular -- to
reduce the deficit you have to reverse what produced the deficit.
What produced it?  Tax cuts and spending increases.  Doing what
people like.  The most popular thing in the world is for me to
cut your tax and write you a check.  And that was what was done
by government for the American people for 12 long years.  I'll
cut your tax and I'll write you a check -- that's a good deal.
It used to be known as a free lunch when I was a kid.

         We have to begin to reverse this process.  And
because government has been at fault, first you should ask
government to change.  So I have asked in Washington that we
begin with significant spending cuts below the budget that was
adopted last year to reduce the deficit and to free up resources
for targeted investment in the future of our economy and of the
young people here present in this hall.

         We should look at every program for possible
savings, including ones that Democrats have favored for a long
time.  And there should be no tax increase, not a dollar, without
the spending cuts.  That is the meaning of the budget resolution
that was passed a few weeks ago in record time.  It contains the
largest deficit reduction proposals in history -- over $500
billion in deficit reduction over a five-year period, with more
than 200 very specific cuts in programs.  Those were tough to
make but necessary in the face of a $4 trillion debt that will
continue to grow until the deficit itself is reduced to zero.

         That deficit is robbing us of our ability to invest
in our future.  More and more of our money just goes to pay
interest on the debt.  If we don't change it, by the end of the
decade over 20 cents on every dollar you pay in taxes will go
just to service the debt.  Now, that is also a redistribution of
wealth away from middle-class taxpayers to the upper-income
people who hold the debt, instead of to invest in the jobs and
the education and the infrastructure of the future of New York
and the rest of America.

         We made cuts in Medicare, a thing that is difficult
to do.  We asked upper-income Social Security recipients to pay
tax on more of their incomes, a thing that is difficult to do.
We asked -- in spite of the fact that I value public service
greatly and I believe public employees too often have been used
as whipping boys for the difficulties and frustrations of the
moment, still I asked the public employees of the United States
of America to have a pay freeze for a year and to keep their wage
increases below inflation and cost of living allowances for each
of the next three years.

         I come from a rural state, heavily electrified by
the Rural Electrification Agency, but I asked that the subsidies
to the REA be reduced.  I asked that certain programs that
benefit cities but that don't have the accountability of the
normal budgeting process also be reduced.  All these were not
easy but, it seems to me, essential if we're going to ask the
American people to sacrifice that the government take the lead
and show the way.

         We're also fighting, however, to do something no
government has done before:  to both reduce the deficit and
increase targeted investments in areas that are designed to
secure the future of this country -- in the ones Governor Cuomo
mentioned:  in Head Start; in the program to get children off to
a healthier start in life with immunizations and nutrition; in
better programs for apprenticeship training for our work force;
in opening the doors of college education to all Americans
through reforming the student loan process and a program of
national service; in new incentives for our industries to develop
new technology.

         These are things which other countries do as a
matter of course and take for granted and which lead to huge
increases in productivity.  The case for them should be plain in
America once inessential spending has been cut.

         The cuts, however, must be credible.  And
credibility is difficult to come by in Washington today.  They
must be legally enforceable; they must be plain to the American
people.  After 12 years of rising deficits and Americans feeling
deceived about the issue, I don't blame the people of this
country for being distrustful about what they hear from
Washington when it comes to bringing down this deficit.

         That is why I have decided today to propose that we
establish a deficit reduction trust fund and put every penny of
new taxes and the budget cuts proposed in my budget into the
trust fund so the American people know that it has to go to
deficit reduction.  (Applause.)

         There are several members of the New York
congressional delegation here today.  I thank them all for being
here and I thank especially Congressman Schumer for his
leadership on this issue.  I thank Senator Moynihan for his
support of this issue.  (Applause.)  Senator Moynihan said on the
way up here that he thought we ought to do it to win a victory
for the clarity of our determination to reduce the deficit.
Senator Bradley had an op-ed piece in the paper today endorsing
the idea.  The time has come to prove that when we say we're
going to do something with the people's money, we actually do it.
(Applause.)

         Let me repeat what this means.  We will create a
trust fund in which every dollar that is raised will go to
deficit reduction and in which all the net budget cuts which have
been approved will do so also.  This is very important.

         This seriousness, however, should not relieve us of
our obligation to recognize that over the long run we must also
bring down the investment deficit in this country.  I am as
dedicated to that as I ever have been.  I know that long-term
economic growth depends on high-quality and comprehensive
education and training; converting the workers and the
investments from defense that is being cut to new technologies
which must be increased; establishing new and innovative
partnerships with the private sectors and, as I said earlier,
opening the doors of college education to all Americans.  But
bringing the deficit down will give us the freedom to do that.

         This budget saves, as I said, about $500 billion.
And the trust fund will ensure that we do just that.  It will be
a change in the way Washington does business.  It has broad
support.  But I also want to emphasize that it will only confirm
the direction on which we have embarked.

         The financial markets here in New York have already
understood the seriousness of this administration.  Look what's
happened to long-term interest rates just since the election --
just since the election.  Mortgage rates at a 20-year low.  Many
other interest rates at record lows.  All the analysts say that
if this can continue a few more months in this period, we will
see about $100 billion freed up for investment in America through
people refinancing their home loans and business loans and taking
our car loans and consumer loans at lower interest rates.  This
is a job stimulus program that is big and important.  And
bringing the deficit down so that the huge overhang of private
and public debt of the 1980s can be refinanced is a great
strategy to begin the economic renewal of America, and we must
stick with it.  (Applause.)

         More can be done.  But to do more we have to
actually rethink the whole way the federal government operates --
how does it operate on its own terms; how does it relate to the
states and the private sector.  I asked the Congress to give me
some more money for technology so I could run the White House
with many fewer people than my predecessors had.  I asked that we
have a 14-percent across-the-board cut in the administrative
costs of the federal government over the next few years; 100,000
reduction in the payroll by attrition, over $9 billion in savings
simply by administrative changes alone.  But that is just the
beginning.

         I have also asked Vice President Gore to head a task
force which will reexamine every agency of the federal
government, every program of the federal government, and the
whole way it is organized.  Every major company in America had to
go through a wrenching reexamination process in the 1980s.  The
federal government had many of its departments cut, but the way
it operated continued to be largely unexamined.  It is time that
we impose the same sort of reexamination process on the national
government.  When we do it, we will find more savings and, more
importantly, we will increase the quality of service to the
American people.  (Applause.)

         Finally, I want to compliment the House of
Representatives last week on passing a bill with the mind-
boggling title of enhanced rescission, but when you strip it away
what it amounts to is a modified line-item veto, which is enjoyed
by most governors and which will enable the President to strike
out spending items that he believes are unnecessary but will give
the Congress the freedom to put them back in after voting on them
individually -- so that the people can make their own judgment
and so can the members of Congress.

         These things will make the federal government more
efficient and will set us on the path to long-term reform.  We
ought to also think about our partnership with the private sector
and our partnership with state and local government.  Mayor
Dinkins mentioned it.  I was gratified to see a couple of
mentions in the press recently about the fact that our
administration had tried to give cities more relief from
unnecessary regulations and states more leeway  in promoting
various kinds of reform in health care.  I just told Governor
Cuomo that I was very excited about the health care reform
package that he put forward in New York, and Hillary's task force
has been very much influenced by the New York reforms.

         We believe that a lot of the problems of America can
be solved by cities and states if the national government will
have targeted investment and then will give people their head to
do what they know needs to be done.  You would be amazed how many
programs have quite a bit of money in them, but most of the money
or a great deal of the money never reaches the ultimate
beneficiaries at the state or the city level because of the all
the layers in between.

         You'd be amazed -- I was in Chicago a couple of days
ago and the Mayor of Chicago that there are one or two programs
that his staff wouldn't even let him try to get for Chicago
because the administrative hassle of securing the funds were so
great.  We're going to change that.  We're going to have a new
and different and vibrant process that trusts the people of New
York and their elected leaders and the state of New York and
their elected leaders and people throughout the country to have
real innovation in the same way that I think we want in the
private sector in the United States.  (Applause.)

         But, finally, let me say -- the Mayor, the lone
clapper.  (Applause.)  We also have proposed to change the
relationship between government and the private sector in a tax
reform package that Senator Moynihan will soon take up if it
passes the House, and I hope it does.  There will be significant
incentives for businesses, large and small, to increase their
investment in this country and to be rewarded for it.  We will
have initiatives that will empower neighborhoods and give people
significant incentives to go into neighborhoods in small towns
and rural areas and in big cities to put real investment there to
create real jobs.

         We'll provide people real incentives to end welfare
as we know it and require them to move forward with that.  We
will do things that are different from what either party has done
before to try to empower people to live up to their God-given
potential in a new and different partnership between the United
States and people in the private sector.

         When you strip it all away, there's still one more
tough question that has to be answered.  If you want the deficit
brought down, we have to face the fact that in 1981, taxes were
cut by six percent of the national income of this country, twice
what President Reagan originally recommended when he was elected
President.  And that gap has never been made up.

         David Stockman, President Reagan's Budget Director,
has an interview in a magazine called the New Politics Quarterly
this month in which he says, I don't agree with all of President
Clinton's spending plan, but at least he's telling the truth; you
cannot fix the deficit without a tax program, because we cut
taxes more than twice as much as we proposed to do it when we
came in.  We got into a bidding war; we got carried away; what we
did was irresponsible.  And then all the politicians since then
never had the stomach to tell the American people the truth.  And
it was just more fun to cut taxes and pass out money than to do
the reverse.  Now, that is the hard truth.

         After I was elected -- I really believed in the
campaign that we could raise revenues modestly on upper income
people, close some corporate tax loopholes and do some other
things, do the spending cuts and bring the deficit down.  After I
was elected, the government announced that the annual deficit was
going to be $50 billion a year bigger in three of the four years
that I would serve as President -- $50 billion a year bigger; and
$15 billion a bigger in the fourth year.  And it became clear to
me that under those circumstances we could not begin by cutting
anyone's taxes; that we ought to have a responsible, balanced
energy tax; and that most of the tax burden should be borne by
those who had their taxes lowered in the '80s while their incomes
went up -- people in higher income groups -- but that we ought to
have a balanced and fair package.  Not to soak the rich, but to
share the burden.  To try to say this is our job.

         And so I say to you, yes, I will put this money in a
trust fund, but that does not mean the money does not have to be
paid.  If you want the interest rates to stay down, if you want
the profits of lower interest rates, you must undergo the pain of
the spending cuts and the tax increases, because that's the only
way to really bring the deficit down.

         Now, the question is, are we going to do this or
not?  Are we going to do this or not?

         AUDIENCE:  Yes, we are.

         THE PRESIDENT:  I think we are.  (Applause.)

         There are some who say no.  Today in Washington
there are 80,000 lobbyists.  It's a growth industry.  (Laughter.)
I'll guarantee you one thing, I created some jobs since I got to
be President.  (Applause.)

         But the Congress is now dealing with two bills which
will help to reform the way our politics work.  They just passed
the motor voter bill, something young people of America really
wanted and which I'm very proud of -- (applause) -- which I hope
and pray will continue the trend of increased voter
participation.  But now Congress is dealing with two tough other
issues.  The United States Senate passed last week a bill,
finally, believe it or not, in the year 1993, finally requiring
everybody who actually lobbies them to register as a lobbyist;
and requiring that the gifts that they give to members of
Congress or the expenditures they make on trips or whatever all
be reported.  Believe it or not, they weren't done before now.
The Congress passed that with only two dissenting votes -- the
Senate did.  The bill is now going to the House.

         In addition to that, last Friday I proposed a
comprehensive campaign finance reform law which will lower the
cost of congressional campaigns, reduce the influence of
political action committees, and open the airwaves to challengers
as well as incumbents for more honest debate.  It is a tough,
good bill.  (Applause.)  If we can pass these bills, they will
help to open the system, too.

         People are full of hope now.  We've received in
three and a half months more letters than the White House got in
all of 1992.  If you haven't gotten yours answered, I hope you'll
be patient.  (Laughter.)  We've got over 200 volunteers coming in
just to open the mail and trying to sort it and read it.  But it
is a wonderful reaffirmation, the critical and the complimentary
and support letters alike, that Americans really want their
system to respond to them again.  And we must do that.

         If the first issue is the economy, or in the
vernacular of my old campaign sign, "it's the economy, stupid" --
that means deficit reduction, investment for jobs in technology
and education.  It means controlling health care costs and
dealing with that crisis.  I should tell you that no matter how
much we reduce the deficit in the next five years, it will go
right back up again if we don't address health care costs because
that's the fastest growing part of the federal budget deficit.

         It must include all these things, as well as
political reform and changing the way government works.  And
change is hard.  It doesn't happen overnight.  You have to do
what Lincoln did -- ask hard questions, give strong answers and
hope the American people rally.

         We can move forward.  We can have a whole new
partnership in this country -- one that goes beyond the things
that normally divide us, beyond the dividing lines of party, of
race, of gender, of region, of income.  We can do that.  Ideas
and energy can replace drift and delay.  We can grow in wealth
and wisdom and liberty.

         But this requires more than good ideas and more than
political energy.  If I may say, if you don't remember anything
else I say, I hope you'll remember this:  The human condition in
the end changes by faith.  And faith cannot be held in your hand.
The Scripture that I carry to my place of worship every Sunday
says, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction
of things unseen."  (Applause.)  But make no mistake about it, it
is by far the most powerful force that can every be mustered in
the cause of change.

         Today we are seeing too much cynicism and too little
faith -- an obsession with the moment.  An obsession with the
politicians and their wins and their losses.  An obsession with
blame and division.  An obsession with paralysis.  An obsession
with always pointing out the pain of change and never embracing
it's promise.  Without faith.  In the end we always wind up
resorting to the easy and the immediate -- tax the other guy; cut
that other program, not mine.  Wait for somebody to deliver the
goods to me, or wait for it not to happen till I can blame
somebody else for what didn't.

         But faith changes all that.  Lincoln's cause in 1860
was to keep our house from dividing.  Our cause today is to put
our house in order.  If a house divided against itself cannot
stand, surely a house in disarray will not provide shelter and a
home.  Surely a house where problems are denied or blamed on
someone else in the next room can never be a home or America.

         To preserve the American Dream in our time and for
your future, yes, our leaders must ask tough questions and give
strong answers.  But people must rally to the cause of change
with faith.  We have to believe again.  Believe through the
frustrations and the difficulties of the moment, as Martin Luther
King characterized them.  Believe through the inevitable rocks in
the road to the ends of the journey.  We must believe through the
smallness and the spite that conflict always brings out in all of
us -- we must believe through that to the spirit and generosity
and courage that is America at it's essence.

         Mr. Lincoln closed his Cooper Union speech with the
following words:  Let us have faith that right makes might.  And
in that faith, let us to the end dare to do our duty as we
understand it.

         My fellow Americans, our clear duty is to revive the
American Dream and restore the American economy.  And for as long
as it takes with energy and joy and humility, let us dare to do
that duty.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

                               END4:25 P.M. EDT