Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/reports/clinton.hi-tech.speech

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I am pleased to present this transcript in its entirety of the
meeting on Monday, February 22 between President Bill Clinton and
Vice-President Gore with the employees of Silicon Graphics. My thanks
to the Internet Society for supplying the transcript and Mark Boolootian
for preparing it for the TELECOM Digest and comp.dcom.telecom group.

PAT

  From: [e-mail] (Mark Boolootian)
  Subject: Transcript of Clinton/Gore SGI meeting
  Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1993 13:53:39 -0800 (PST)


The following is provided via the courtesy of the Internet Society
White House Press Release Gopher Service.


  E X E C U T I V E   O F F I C E   O F   T H E   P R E S I D E N T

                        THE WHITE HOUSE

                 Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release                          February 22, 1993


                         REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                          AND VICE PRESIDENT TO
                        SILICON GRAPHICS EMPLOYEES

                             Silicon Graphics
                        Mountain View, California


10:00 A.M. PST

        THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I want to thank you all for the
introduction to your wonderful company.  I want to thank Ed and Ken
 -- we saw them last night with a number of other of the executives from
Silicon Valley -- people, many of them with whom I've worked for a
good length of time; many of whom the Vice President's known for a
long time in connection with his work on supercomputing and other
issues.

        We came here today for two reasons, and since mostly we just
want to listen to you I'll try to state this briefly.  One reason was
to pick this setting to announce the implementation of the technology
policy we talked about in the campaign, as an expression of what we
think the national government's role is in creating a partnership with
the private sector to generate more of these kinds of companies, more
technological advances to keep the United States always on the cutting
edge of change and to try to make sure we'll be able to create a lot
of good new jobs for the future.

        The second reason -- can I put that down?  We're not ready yet
for this.  The second reason I wanted to come here is, I think the
government ought to work like you do.  (Applause.)  And before that
can ever happen we have to be able to get the people, the Congress,
and the press who have to interpret all this to the people to imagine
what we're talking about.

        I have, for example, the first state government in the country
that started a total quality management program in all the departments
of government, trying to figure out how we could reinvent the
government.  And I basically believe my job as President is to try to
adjust America in good ways so that we can win in the 21st century, so
that we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

        Ed said that you plan your new products knowing they'll be
obsolete within 12 to 18 months, and you want to be able to replace
them.  We live in an era of constant change.  And America's biggest
problem, if you look at it through that lens, is that for too many
people change is an enemy, not a friend.  I mean, one reason you're
all so happy is you found a way to make change your friend, right?
Diversity is a strength, not a source of division, right?  (Applause.)
Change is a way to make money, not throw people out of work, right?

        If you decentralize and push decisions made down to the lowest
possible level you enable every employee to live up to the fullest of
their ability.  And you don't make them -- by giving them a six-week
break every four years, you don't force them to make these sharp
divisions between your work life and your private life.  It's sort of
a seamless web.  These are things we need to learn in America, and we
need to incorporate even into more traditional workplaces.

        So I'd like to start -- we'll talk about the technology policy
later, and the Vice President, who had done so much work, will talk a
lot about the details at the end of this meeting.  But I just want to
start by telling you that one of our missions -- in order to make this
whole thing work we're going to have to make the government work
differently.

        Example: We cut the White House staff by 25 percent to set a
standard for cutting inessential spending in the government.  But the
work load of the White House is way up.  We're getting all-time record
telephone calls and letters coming in, and we have to serve our
customers, too.  Our customers are the people that put us there, and
if they have to wait three months for an answer to a letter, that's
not service.

        But when we took office, I walked into the Oval Office -- it's
supposed to be the nerve center of the United States -- and we found
Jimmy Carter's telephone system.  (Laughter.)  All right.  No speaker
phone, no conference calls, but anybody in the office could punch the
lighted button and listen to the President talk.  (Laughter.)  So that
I could have the conference call I didn't want but not the one I did.
(Laughter and applause.)

        Then we went down into the basement where we found Lyndon
Johnson's switchboard.  (Laughter.)  True story -- where there were
four operators working from early morning till late at night --
literally, when a phone would come and they'd say, "I want to talk to
the Vice President's office," they would pick up a little cord and
push it into a little hole.  (Laughter.)  That's today -- right?

        We found procedures that were so bureaucratic and cumbersome
for procurement that Einstein couldn't figure them out, and all the
offices were organized in little closed boxes -- just the opposite of
what you see.

        In our campaign, however -- we ran an organization in the
presidential campaign that was very much like this.  Most decisions
were made in a great big room in morning meetings that we had our
senior staff in, but any 20-year-old volunteer who had a good idea
could walk right in and say, "here's my idea."  Some of them were very
good and we incorporated them.

        And we had a man named Ellis Mottur who helped us to put
together our technology policy who said -- he was one of our senior
citizens; he was in his 50s.  (Laughter.)  And he said, "I've been
writing about high-performance work organizations all my life.  And
this is the first one I've ever worked in and it has no organizational
chart.  I can't figure out what it looks like on paper, but it works."

        The Vice President was making fun of me when we were getting
ready for the speech I gave Wednesday night to the Congress; it was
like making sausage.  People were running in and out saying, put this
in and take this out.  (Laughter.)  But it worked.  You know, it
worked.  (Applause.)

        So I want to hear from you, but I want you to know that we
have hired a person at the Office of Management and Budget who has
done a lot of work in creating new businesses and turning businesses
around -- to run the management part of that.  We're trying to review
all these indictments that have been issued over the last several
years about the way the federal government is run.  But I want you to
know that I think a major part of my missions is to literally change
the way the national government works, spends your tax dollars, so
that we can invest more and consume less and look toward the future.
And that literally will ^L require rethinking everything about the way
the government operates.

        The government operates so much to keep bad things from
happening that there's very little energy left in some places to make
good things happen.  If you spend all your time trying to make sure
nothing bad happens there's very little time and money and human
energy left to make good things happen.  We're going to try to pare
away a lot of that bureaucracy and speed up the decision-making
process and modernize it.  And I know a lot of you can help.
Technology is a part of that, but so is organization and empowerment,
which is something you've taught us again today.  And I thank you very
much.  (Applause.)

        We want to do a question and answer now, and then the Vice
President is going to talk in more detail about our technology policy
later.  But that's what we and Ed agreed to do.  He's my boss today;
I'm doing what he -- (laughter.)  So I wonder if any of you have a
question you want to ask us, or a comment you want to make.

        Yes, go ahead.

        Q    Now that Silicon Graphics has entered the supercomputer
arena, supercomputers are subject to very stringent and costly export
controls.  Is part of your agenda to review the export control system,
and can industry count on export regulations that will keep pace with
technology advances in our changing world?

        THE VICE PRESIDENT: Let me start off on that.  As you may
know, the President appointed as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce John
Rollwagon who was the CEO at Cray.  And he and Ron Brown, the
Secretary of Commerce, have been reviewing a lot of procedures for
stimulating U.S.  exports around the world.  And we're going to be a
very export-oriented administration.

        However, we are also going to keep a close eye on the
legitimate concerns that have in the past limited the free export of
some technologies that can make a dramatic difference in the ability
of a Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons or ICBMs.

        Now, in some cases in the past, these legitimate concerns have
been interpreted and implemented in a way that has frustrated American
business unnecessarily.  There are, for example, some software
packages that are available off the shelves in stores here that are,
nevertheless, prohibited from being exported.  And sometimes that's a
little bit unrealistic.  On the other hand, there are some in business
who are understandably so anxious to find new customers that they will
not necessarily pay as much attention as they should to what the
customer might use this new capacity for.  And that's a legitimate
role for government, to say, hold on, the world will be a much more
dangerous place if we have 15 or 20 nuclear powers instead of five or
six; and if they have ICBMs and so forth.

        So it's a balance that has to be struck very carefully.  And
we're going to have a tough nonproliferation strategy while we promote
more exports.

        THE PRESIDENT: If I might just add to that -- the short answer
to your question, of course, is yes, we're going to review this.  And
let me give you one example.  Ken told me last night at dinner that
 -- he said, if we export substantially the same product to the same
person, if we have to get one permit to do it we'll have to get a
permit every time we want to do the same thing over and over again.
They always give it to us, but we have to wait six months and it puts
us behind the competitive arc.  Now, that's something that ought to be
changed, and we'll try to change that.

        We also know that some of our export controls, rules and
regulations, are a function of the realities of the Cold War which
aren't there anymore.  But what the Vice President was trying to say,
and he said so well -- I just want to reemphasize -- our biggest
security problem in the future may well be the proliferation of
nuclear and nonnuclear, like biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction to small, by our standards, countries with militant
governments who may not care what the damage to their own people could
be.  So that's something we have to watch very closely.

        But apart from that, we want to move this much more quickly
and we'll try to slash a lot of the time delays where we ought to be
doing these things.

        Q   Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, you've seen scientific
visualization in practice here.  As a company we're also very
interested in ongoing research in high-performance computing and
scientific visualization.  Can we expect to see a change in the
national scientific agenda that includes scientific visualization?
Right now I don't see the scientific visualization as being
represented, for example, on the FCCSET committee.

        THE VICE PRESIDENT: It is a good question.  One of the people
who flew out here with us for this event and for the release of the
technology policy in just a few minutes is Dr. Jack Gibbons, who is in
the back of the room -- the President's science advisor and head of
the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  And he will be in charge
of the FCCSET process.  That's an acronym that -- what does it stand
for, Jack - - the Federal Coordinating Council on Science and
Engineering Technology.  And visualization will play a key role in the
deliberations of the FCCSET.

        We were actually, believe it or not, talking about this a
little bit with Dr. Gibbons on the way over here.  I had hearings one
time where a scientist used sort of technical terms that he then
explained --it made an impression on me.  He said, if you tried to
describe the human mind in terms applicable to a computer you'd say we
have a low bit rate but high resolution.  (Laughter.)  Meaning --this
is one of the few audiences I can use that line with.  (Laughter and
applause.)

        But he went on to explain what that means.  When we try to
absorb information bit by bit, we don't have a huge capacity to do it.
That's why the telephone company, after extensive studies, decided
that seven numbers were the most that we could keep in short-term
memory.  And then they added three more.  (Laughter.)  But if we can
see lots of information portrayed visually in a pattern or mosaic,
where each bit of data relates to all of the others, we can instantly
absorb a lot of information.  We can all recognize the Milky Way, for
example, even though there are trillions of points of light, stars,
and so forth.

        And so the idea of incorporating visualization as a key
component of this strategy is one that we recognize as very important
and we're going to pursue it.

        THE PRESIDENT: Let me just add one thing to that.  First of
all, I told the crowd last night that the Vice President was the only
person ever to hold national office in America who knew what the
gestalt of the gigabit is.  (Laughter.)  But anyway -- and now we're
going to get some very funny articles out of this.  They're going to
make fun of us for being policy wonks.  (Laughter.)

        Let me say something to sort of take this one step further.
This whole visualization movement that you have been a part of in your
line of work is going to merge in a very short time with the whole
business in traditional education theory called applied academics.
We're now finding with just sort of basic computer work in the
elementary schools of our country dramatic differences in learning
curves among people who can see the work they're doing as opposed to
people who are supposed to read it.  And we're now finding that the
IQs of young people who might take a vocational track in school may
not be all that different from kids that would stay in a traditional
academic track and wind up at Stanford, but their learning patterns
are dramatically different.

        And there are some people -- this is a huge new discovery,
basically, that's coming into the whole business of traditional
educational theory.  So someday what you're doing here will
revolutionize the basic teaching in our schools, starting at
kindergarten and going forward, so that the world of work and the
world of education will begin to be merged backwards all the way to
the beginning.  And it's going to be, I think, the most important
thing we've ever done.  And very important for proving that in a
diverse population all people can reach very high levels of
achievement.

        MR. MCCRACKEN: The President and Vice President have also come
here today to present a new national technology policy for the
country.  Do you want to --

        THE PRESIDENT: We'll answer some more questions.  (Applause.)
I'm going to forego my time and just let him announce the policy, so
we can hear some more questions.  Got to give the man equal time, I
know.  (Laughter.)

        Q       I'd just like to say, I didn't vote for you; I wish I
had.  (Laughter.)

        THE PRESIDENT: I hope you feel that way four years from now.
(Laughter and applause.)

        Q   Well, that's actually why I'm standing up -- I really see a
possibility in what you stand for and I really think this is why you
were elected.  That you say you stand for change; you said that during
your campaign.  I think the company believed that.  They're counting
on you -- I'm nervous -- and I just want to say we're really with the
country behind you.  I think that's why the statistics are saying that
we're willing to have our taxes increased, we're willing to have cuts,
because you say you're really going to do it this time and decrease
the deficit.  I hope to God that you do.  We need it not just for this
present time, but by your actually fulfilling on this it will make a
major change in how we feel about government; that when government
says they're going to make a difference and they really come through,
it will make a huge impact for the future.  And I'm really personally
behind you all the way.  I wish I'd voted for you.  (Applause.)

        THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.  I really appreciate that.  Let me
make one comment in response if I might.  I think it's important --
and you can help others understand this -- to understand why we have
to reduce the deficit, which is something that is normally not done
when unemployment is high.  And unemployment is still too high.  Even
though we're in an economic recovery, most of our recovery is due to
high productivity from firms that, in turn, this time are not hiring
new people for all kinds of reasons.

        And we have to reduce the deficit for two reasons: Number one,
if we don't -- we're already spending 15 percent of your tax money
just to pay interest on past debt.  If we don't change present
patterns we'll be over 20 cents by the year 2000.  That's money we
should be spending on education and technology in the future.

        Number two, the more money we take out of the pool of funds
for borrowing the more expensive it is for companies like this and
other companies that have to go into the markets and borrow to borrow.
Just since the election, since we made it clear we were going to try
to bring the deficit down, long-term interest rates have dropped .7 of
one percent.  That is a huge savings for everybody that is going to
borrow money or that has a variable interest rate on a loan, whether
it's a home mortgage or a business loan or a car loan or whatever.
That's important.

        The second thing we're trying to do that I know you will also
appreciate is to shift the balance of money we do spend more away from
consumption toward investment.  Investments in education technology,
environmental cleanup, and converting from a defense to a domestic
economy.  That one of the bizarre things that happened to us in the
'80s is that we increased the deficit first through defenses expenses
and then through exploding health care costs and increasing interest
payments.  But we reduced our investments in the future and the things
that make us richer.

        So those are the changes we're trying to effect.  Let me just
make one other point.  I will not support raising anybody's taxes
unless budget cuts also pass.  (Applause.)

        Q      One of the things that Silicon Graphics has been really
successful is selling into the international markets, approximately 50
percent of our revenues come internationally, including a substantial
market in Japan.  What types of programs does your administration plan
to help the high-growth companies of the '90s sell to the
international markets?

        THE PRESIDENT: Two things.  First of all, we intend to try to
open new markets and new markets in our region.  That is, I believe
that high-growth companies are going to -- to keep America growing, I
believe high-growth companies are going to have to sell south of the
border more.  And to do that we have to negotiate trade agreements
that will help to raise incomes in those countries even as we are
growing.  That's why I support, with some extra agreements, the NAFTA
agreement; and why I hope we can have an agreement with Chile, and
hope we can have an agreement with other countries like Argentina that
are making a serious effort to build market economies.  Because we
want to build new markets for all of you.

        With Japan, I think what we have to do is to try to continue
to help more companies figure out how to do business there and keep
pushing them to open their markets.  I don't want to close American
markets to Japanese products, but it is the only nation with which we
have a persistent and unchanging structural deficit.

        The product deficit with Japan is not $43 billion, which is our
 overall trade deficit, it is actually about $60 billion in product,
in manufactured production.  So we have -- we've got a lot of problems
we have to work out there.

        With Europe, we sometimes are in surplus, we're sometimes in
deficit, but it's a floating thing.  So it's more or less in balance.
With developing nations like Taiwan and Korea, those countries had big
surpluses with us, but as they became richer they brought them down,
so that we're more or less in balance.  We have our biggest trade
relationship with Canada and we're more or less in balance.

        So we have to work on this Japanese issue while trying to help
more of you get involved.  Let me make one final comment on that.  I
think we should devote more government resources to helping small and
medium-size companies figure out how to trade, because that's what the
Germans do with such great success and why they're one of the great
exporters of the world.  They don't waste a lot of money on the real
big companies that have already figured it out, but they have extra
efforts for small and medium-size companies to get them to think
global from the beginning of their endeavors.  And I think we're going
to have to do more of that.

        Q    In addition to concerns about the economy, Silicon Graphics
employees are also concerned about the environment.  Your economic
plan does a great job of promoting R&D investment.  Are there any
elements that are specifically targeted to promote the application of
Silicon Graphics' technology to environmental-friendly initiatives
such as the electric car or the -- train?

        THE PRESIDENT: I think I should let the Vice President answer
that since it's his consuming passion.  And if I do it, his book sales
will go up again.  (Laughter.)  You see, we devoted a lot of time and
attention to that because -- for two reasons.  One is the environment
needs it.  Secondly, we think it's wonderful economics, because I
believe that all these environmental opportunities that are out there
for us represent a major chunk of what people who used to be involved
in defense technologies could be doing in the future if we're going to
maintain a high wage base in America.

        So I'd like for the Vice President to talk a little about the
specifics that we're working on.

        THE VICE PRESIDENT: That goal is integrated into the
technology plan as one of our key objectives.  The Japanese and the
Germans are now openly saying that the biggest new market in the
history of world business is the market for the new products,
technologies and processes that foster economic progress without
environmental destruction.

        Some have compared the drive for environmental efficiency to
the movement for quality control and the quality revolution in the
'60s and '70s.  At that time, many companies in the United States felt
that the existing level of product quality was more or less ordained
by the forces of supply and demand and it couldn't be improved without
taking it out of the bottom line.  But the Japanese, taking U.S.
innovations from Dr.  Demming and others, began to introduce a new
theory of product quality and simultaneously improved quality,
profits, wages, and productivity.

        The environmental challenge now presents us with the same
opportunity.  By introducing new attention to environmental efficiency
at every step along the way, we can simultaneously reduce the impact
of all our processes on the environment, improve environmental
efficiency and improve productivity at the same time.  We need to set
clear specific goals in the technology policy, in the economic plan.

        And, you know, both the stimulus and the investment package
focus a great deal on environmental cleanup and environmental
innovation.  And whereas, we've talked a lot about roads and bridges
in the past, and they're a big part of this plan also, we're putting
relatively more emphasis as well on water lines and sewer lines and
water treatment plants and renovating the facilities in the national
parks and cleaning up trails; taking kids from inner cities and
putting them to work cleaning up trails in national parks, for
example, as part of the summer jobs programs.

        So you'll find when you look at both the technology plan and
the economic plan an enormous emphasis on the environment.
(Applause.)

        THE PRESIDENT:  Go ahead sir.  They say we have to quit in a
minute.  I'll take one more question after this.

        Q    Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, the news stories and
articles that the public has access to regarding the budget and the
economy are very often confusing and contradictory.  I might explain
it in the same terms you used: the information is delivered low-bit
rate, but the problem is huge and requires the high-road's view.  So
my question is I wonder if you're using Lyndon Johnson's computer to
analyze the budget and the economy -- whether or not you might be open
to using some of the things you've seen here to get the bigger picture
and also communicate that to us.  (Laughter.)


        THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.  There are two things I'd like to
respond to on that and I'd like to invite you to help.  I'd like to
invite you to help and I'd like to invite you to help on two grounds:
One is the simple ground of helping to decide which visual images best
capture the reality of where we are and where we're going.

        Senator Moynihan and I went to Franklin Roosevelt's home in
Hyde Park, New York, just a couple of days ago.  You may have seen the
press on it.  And on the way back he said to me that the challenges
that we face are different from those that Roosevelt faced, but just
as profound.  Unemployment was higher and America was more devastated
when he took office, he said, but everybody knew what the problem was.
Therefore, he had a lot of leeway working with the Congress in the
beginning to work toward a solution.  Now, he said, we are facing
severe challenges to a century of economic leadership and it's not
clear to every American exactly what the dimensions of the problem
are.

        The capacity you have to help me help the American people
conceptualize this is quite significant: showing the trends in the
deficit, showing the trends in the investment, showing how the money
is spent now and how we propose to spend it.

        The second big problem we have you can see if you look at the
front page of USA Today today, which shows a traditional analysis,
yesterday's analysis -- of the business section -- of the economic
program.  It basically says, oh, it will bring unemployment a little
and it will increase economic growth a little if we do this, but not
all that much.  Now, why is that?  That's because traditional economic
analysis says that the only way the government can ever help the
economy grow is by spending more money and taxing less.  In other
words, traditional changing economics will run a bigger deficit.

        But we can't do that.  The deficit is already so big, I can't
run the risk to the long-term stability of this country by going in
and doing that.

        This analysis doesn't really make a distinction between
investment and consumption; doesn't take any account of what we might
to with the technology policy or a trade policy to make the economy
grow faster; has no way of factoring in what other good things could
happen in the private market if you brought long term interests rates
down through the deficit.

        So you could also help us to reconceptualize this.  A lot of
the models that dominate policymaking are yesterday's models, too.
I'll give you just one example.  The Japanese had a deficit about as
big as ours and they were increasing spending at 19 percent a year
 -- government spending -- back in the early '70s when the oil prices
went way up and they were more energy-dependant than we were on
foreign oil.  And they just decided they had change it, but they
couldn't stop investing.

        So they had a budget which drew a big distinction -- a literal
distinction -- legal distinction between investment and consumption
and they embarked on a 10 or 11-year effort to bring the budget into
balance.  And during that time they increased investment and lowered
unemployment and increased growth through the right kind of spending
and investment.

        And I want to lead in, if I might, and ask the Vice President
before we go to give you some of the specifics of this technology
policy by making one more pitch to you about this whole economic plan.
This plan has 150 specific budget cuts.  And I will be welcome -- I'm
welcome to more.  I told the Republican leadership if they had more
budget cuts that didn't compromise our economy, if they helped us, I
would be glad to embrace them.  I'm not hung up about that, but I did
pretty good in four weeks to find 150.  And I'll try to find some more
on my own.

        It also has the revenue increases that you know about.  It
also has some spending increases and there will be debate about that.
There will be people who say, well, just don't spend this new money,
don't immunize all the kids, don't fully fund Head Start, don't pay
for this technology policy, don't invest in all these environmental
cleanup things, and that way you won't have to raise taxes so much.

        The problem is, if you look at the historic spending trends,
we are too low on investment and too high on the deficit -- and both
are problems.  And secondly, we've got to have some of these economic
cooperations in order to move the economy forward.

        So I want you to listen to what the Vice President says in
that context.  Because what you will hear is, we don't need to do what
we think we should do in this area.  If we don't, I think we'll be out
of competition.  People like you will do fine because you've got a
good company here, but the country as a whole will fall behind.  And
you can help on both those points.

        So would you proceed?

        THE VICE PRESIDENT: I want to give you just a few of the
details of this technology policy.  There will be a printed copy
available and you will be able to see for yourself all of the goals
and all of the elements of it.

        But I want to start by describing how it fits into the
President's economic plan.  You know, some of the special interests
who oppose the President's plan are saying to the American people,
don't pass this plan because everything is fine just the way it is.
Well, anybody who says everything is fine with our economy hasn't been
to California lately.  We need some change.  We can't stand the status
quo.  (Applause.)

        California has to participate in the recovery in order for
America to have a recovery that is worth the name recovery.  So that we
 can start creating new jobs.  And many of the high-skill, high-wage
jobs of the future are in technology areas.  And that's why a key
component of the President's economic plan is the technology policy
that we're announcing here today.

        It starts with an appreciation of the importance of continuing
basic R&D, because that's the foundation for all of the exciting
products that this company and others like this company come up with.
It continues with an emphasis on improving education, because in order
for companies like this one to survive and prosper in the world
economy, we as a nation have to have highly educated, well-trained
young men and women coming out of colleges on to campuses like this --
it's not called -- you call it a campus, right?  That's the term
that's very common now.

        We also have to pay attention to the financial environment in
which companies like this have to exist.  In order for this company to
attract investors for the kind of products that you are building here,
you have got to be able to tell them that the interest rates are not
going to be too high if they're borrowing money to invest; you've got
to be able to tell them, look, President Clinton is making permanent
the R&D tax credit, for example, and there are going to be specific
new provisions in the law to encourage investment in high-risk
ventures that are very common in the high-technology area.

        And then this plan makes specific investments in something
called the national information infrastructure.  Now, infrastructure
is a five- dollar word that used to describe roads, bridges, water
lines, and sewer lines.  But if we're going to compete in the 21st
century, we have to invest in a new kind of infrastructure.

        During the Industrial Revolution, the nations that competed
most successfully were often ones that did the best job of building
deep-water ports; those that did the best job of putting in good
railway systems to carry the coal and the products to the major
centers where they were going to be sold and consumed.  But now we are
seeing a change in the definition of commerce.  Technology plays a
much more important role.  Information plays a much more important
role.

        And one of the things that this plan calls for is the rapid
completion of a nationwide network of information super highways.
(Applause.)  So that the kind of demonstrations that we saw upstairs
will be accessible in everybody's home.  We want to make it possible
for a school child to come home after class and, instead of just
playing Nintendo, to plug into a digital library that has color-moving
graphics that respond interactively to that child's curiosity.

        Now, that's not the only reason to have such a network or a
national information infrastructure.  Think about the importance of
software.  If we could make it possible for talented young software
writers here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the United States to
sell their latest product by downloading it from their desk into a
nationwide network that represented a marketplace with an outlet right
there in that person's home or business, we would make it possible for
the men and women who are interested in technology jobs here in the
United States to really thrive and prosper.

        And in keeping with one of the questions that was asked
earlier about how we can export more into the world marketplace and
how we can be more successful in world competition, one way is by
making our own domestic market the most challenging, most exciting,
with the most exacting standards and levels of quality of any nation
in the world.  And then we will naturally roll out of our domestic
marketplace into the world marketplace and compete successfully with
our counterparts everywhere in the world.

        Now, there are some other specific elements of this package
which you can read for yourself when you see the formal package.  Let
me just list them very briefly: A permanent extension of the research
and experimentation tax credit; completion of the national information
infrastructure; specific investments in advanced manufacturing
technology with measures such as -- (applause.)  And in response to
one of the questions that was asked over here, there is a specific
program on high-speed rail to do the work necessary, to lay the
foundation for a nationwide network of high-speed rail transportation,
and a specific project to work cooperatively with the automobile
companies in the United States of America to facilitate the more rapid
development of a new generation of automobiles that will beat all the
world standards and position our automobile industry to dominate the
automobile industry of the future in the world.  (Applause.)

        We also have a specific goal to apply technology to education
and training.  Dr. Gibbon* and others have given a tremendous amount
of thought to this because, after all of the dashed hopes and false
expectations for computers in schools, ironically, we now have a new
generation of educational hardware and software that really can make a
revolutionary difference in the classroom, and it's time to use it.
(Applause.)

        And we are going to save billions of dollars each year part
way through this decade with the full implementation of environmental
technologies and energy efficiency technologies, starting with federal
buildings.  We're going to save a billion dollars a year in 1997 just
in the energy costs of federal buildings around the United States by
using off-the-shelf technology that has a four-year payback on the
investment.  And then we're going to encourage the use of those
technologies around the country, and we're going to invest in the more
rapid creation of new generations of that technology.

        Now, the other details of this technology program will be
available in the handout that's going to be passed out here.  And any
of you who have ideas on how we can improve it and make better use of
technology, we invite you to contact us and let us know how we can
improve this program as we go along.

        But one final word.  The President's economic program is
based, as he said, on cutting spending; reducing the deficit over
time, including with some revenue increases that are progressive and
fair; and also investing in those things which we know will create
good, high-wage, high-skilled jobs here in the United States.  You all
are pioneers in a sense, showing how that can be accomplished.  We
want to make it easier for working men and women throughout this
company and other companies to follow your example and to create more
jobs in high technology.

        And that is the focus of this economic -- of this technology
policy, which is part of the overall plan to create more jobs for the
American people and get our economy moving again.  (Applause.)

        THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

                            END 10:41 A.M. PST


               ------------------------------------

Mark Boolootian        [e-mail]        [phone]
Disclaimer:  booloo speaks for booloo and no other.