H.Doc.105-9 STATUS ON IRAQ ...

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In keeping our veterans' commitments, our commitments to our 
veterans, to help them make the most of their own lives does 
not only help veterans and their families, it's made America a 
better and stronger place.
    For education to employment, from buying a home to getting 
quality medical care, our veterans deserve our nation's 
support, and when we give it, our nation is better off. For the 
past three and a half years, that is what we have done.
    Even as we cut government spending to reduce the deficit 
and move toward a balanced budget, I have asked for a billion-
dollar increase in funding for the VA, more than half for 
medical care and discretionary programs, including funds for a 
new hospital and nursing home in Brevard County, Florida and a 
replacement hospital at Travis Air Force Base in California. 
[Applause.]
    We are committed to keeping the VA health care system 
strong into the 21st century, and we know that requires us to 
carry out a dramatic restructuring that will improve the 
quality of care and make our hospitals more patient-centered 
and less bureaucratic. Last year I sent to Congress legislation 
that will allow us to simplify the complex and arcane 
eligibility rules and improve access to care at VA hospitals. 
[Applause.] I am pleased that Congress is beginning to act on 
this important proposal, and I hope they will get a bill to me 
this year.
    Very soon we will submit legislation for a pilot project to 
allow Medicare-eligible veterans to obtain treatment at a VA 
facility and to have the costs reimbursed by Medicare. 
[Applause.]
    I also want to make special mention of the extraordinary 
care that is provided by our veterans facilities to people with 
spinal cord injuries, and my commitment to continue the work 
and research and care in this important area. Recently, after a 
visit with Christopher Reeve, I was pleased to announce that we 
are increasing our research commitment $10 million a year in 
this year.
    And I hope all of you noticed just a few days ago that we 
finally are beginning to show some incredible results, where 
nerve transplants from the ribs to the spinal cord of 
laboratory animals have succeeded in giving laboratory animals 
some mobility in their limbs again. We can do better on this, 
and we have to keep going until we have some real success. 
[Applause.]
    We have also reached out to veterans service organizations, 
appointing veterans as delegates to the White House Conference 
on Aging and the Presidential Delegation to Vietnam. We 
established the first ever inter-agency veterans policy groups 
to coordinate and spur progress on issues of concern to 
veterans and military organizations.
    One such issue for more than two decades has been the 
suffering of our nation's Vietnam veterans who were exposed to 
Agent Orange. [Applause.] In May, I announced that Vietnam 
veterans with prostate cancer and peripheral neuropathy are 
entitled to disability payments based on their exposure to 
Agent Orange. Just this week I sent to Congress legislation to 
provide an appropriate remedy for children of Vietnam veterans 
who suffer from spina bifida. [Applause.]
    We have also responded aggressively to Persian Gulf 
illnesses. [Applause.] As the First Lady was traveling around 
the country talking about health care to people all over 
America, she kept coming back to the White House with stories 
of people who had served in the Persian Gulf conflict who had 
difficulties that were otherwise inexplicable.
    She got very involved, even emotionally involved, with some 
of the families, and she kept hammering on me that there had to 
be an explanation for this, and there was no other conceivable 
explanation for some of these instances of difficulties.
    She encouraged me to appoint a Presidential Advisory 
Committee on Gulf War veterans illnesses. I did that and 
charged them to leave no stone unturned in finding the cause of 
the illnesses and improving care available to Persian Gulf 
veterans. Meanwhile, we have made available for the first time 
ever compensation to the victims of undiagnosed illnesses who 
served in the Gulf War. [Applause.] I think they did the right 
thing there.
    One other area of endeavor is especially important to me, 
improving the contributions of all of our veterans to the 
maintenance of their own lives and their families and our 
communities. Today, as we celebrate the sixth anniversary of 
the Americans with Disabilities Act, I want to reiterate a 
pledge I made in 1992. Our disability policy should be based as 
a nation on three simple principles: inclusion, independence 
and empowerment. [Applause.]
    I know how hard you fought, along with others in the 
disability community, for the passage of this important 
legislation. We've made vigorous laws protecting all people 
with disabilities a top priority. We'll continue to do so until 
all the barriers come down. Consistent with that commitment, my 
budget for 1997 proposes an increase in the resources available 
to enforce the Americans With Disabilities Act.
    One of the main objectives of the act is to improve 
employment possibilities for people with disabilities. 
Unemployment among disabled veterans in particular is still too 
high. I am pleased that Ron Drach, DAV's employment director, 
is serving as vice-chair of the President's Committee on 
Employment of People With Disabilities. I thank him for his 
hard work to turn those employment numbers around. And we 
should all be grateful that he is on the job. [Applause.]
    Beyond the duty we owe to our veterans, there are certain 
duties we all owe to each other and to our country if our 
children are to live in a 21st century that is full of peace 
and possibility. First, we have to give the American dream of 
opportunity to everyone who is willing to work for it. That 
means we have to have an economy that is strong and growing, 
that produces good jobs with growing incomes.
    When I became President, I was worried about the drift in 
our economy and the increasing divisions within it. We've put 
in place an aggressive strategy: To reduce the deficit, because 
that would get interest rates down and spur private investment, 
and remove a burden from future generations; to increase trade 
so that we could sell more American products and services 
around the world in a global economy; and to invest in our 
people and their potential so that everyone could participate 
in this global economy in a positive way over the long run.
    We invested in education, in how to protect the environment 
while growing the economy, in transportation, in research and 
technology, in defense conversion to help those communities 
that had helped us to win the Cold War so that they wouldn't be 
left out in the cold. We even lowered the average closing cost 
for first-time home buyers by a thousand dollars so young 
families could start getting in homes again instead of just 
having a distant dream. [Applause.]
    It's been a remarkable turnaround in these last three and a 
half years. The deficit was lowered from $290 billion a year 
when I became President. It will be $117 billion this year, a 
60 percent reduction. It's the first time since John Tyler was 
President in the 1840s that an administration has reduced the 
deficit four years in a row. And I'm proud of that. [Applause.]
    I have to tell you, by the way, that my staff is pleading 
with me to stop using that statistic because John Tyler was not 
reelected. [Laughter.] But still it sounds great, because it's 
true and it's important.
    Our economy has produced ten million new jobs, 3.7 million 
new home owners, eight million home owners who've refinanced 
their mortgages at lower interest rates. Home ownership is at a 
15-year high. Exports are at a record. For three years in a 
row, we've had a record number of new small businesses formed 
in America. And for the first time in a decade, incomes are 
actually going up for average American working people again. 
This is important. It matters. [Applause.]
    Veterans' employment. Veterans' unemployment has dropped by 
nearly a third from 7.2 percent to 4.9 percent in January of 
1996. Six million veterans have received training and job 
search assistance through the Department of Labor in the last 
three and a half years. Two million now have jobs. We are 
clearly moving in the right direction.
    We have other responsibilities as well. I want to just 
mention a couple. One is heavily on my mind at this moment. We 
have a responsibility to make our streets and our schools and 
our neighborhoods safer. The United States cannot tolerate the 
rates of crime and violence which have come to be almost 
commonplace in our country in the last several years. We have 
to intensify our efforts to reduce crime.
    The deaths of two police officers within a 24-hour period 
right here in New Orleans last week painfully drove that point 
home to everyone who knew about them. I had the opportunity to 
meet with their families just before coming in here, and I want 
to personally offer my condolences to the families of Officers 
Joey Thomas and Chris McCormick, who died while protecting the 
citizens of this city. They, too, were patriots who paid the 
ultimate price. And I know you join me in praying for their 
families. [Applause.]
    In the past three and a half years, we have tried to change 
the nation's approach to crime from rhetoric to action. We've 
had a clear strategy: Look at what works and make it happen 
everywhere. When I became President, to be perfectly frank, 
even though we had a high crime rate, there were cities all 
over the country that had already begun to lower their crime 
rate. And I went to those places and asked them how they were 
doing it.
    It was obvious to me what was going on. They were putting 
more police on the street, out from behind the cars, out from 
behind the desk, walking the streets, getting to know kids, 
getting to know neighbors, working with them, preventing crime 
as well as catching criminals more quickly.
    I asked them what they needed, and they told me, and that 
became the Crime Bill that we passed in 1994: 100,000 police on 
the street, a ban on assault weapons, tougher punishment for 
people who are serious criminals, and prevention programs to 
help kids stay out of crime in the first place. We also passed 
the Brady Bill that kept 60,000 felons, fugitives and stalkers 
from buying handguns, and there wasn't a single hunter that 
lost his or her hunting weapons. So we did the right thing, and 
for four years in a row, crime has been coming down in the 
United States. We can be proud of that. [Applause.]
    But it is not enough. We're now going around the country 
trying to explain to communities how they can, without fear of 
legal challenge, institute curfew policies, as New Orleans has, 
for juveniles in a way that has dramatically lowered the 
juvenile crime rate here, and in a positive way has helped a 
lot of juveniles to sort through their own problems and get 
back on the right track in life.
    School uniform policies and tough truancy policies, like so 
many California communities I've seen have implemented in a way 
that has increased learning in the schools and diminished crime 
beyond the school yard. There are more things we can do in this 
way and we must all continue to do it. [Applause.]
    We have a responsibility to reform the welfare system. I'm 
sure you've all seen the big debate about welfare in 
Washington. Let me just say that we have been working for three 
and a half years on that through a provision of existing law 
which allows the President to say to any state in the country 
that presents a plan to move people from welfare to work and to 
require them to move from welfare to work, you can get around 
all the federal rules and regulations if you're doing that.
    But let me ask you as you see this debate unfold in the 
next few days, to think about your own family and ask yourself, 
well, what do I really want to change in the welfare system? 
And I think to answer the question, you have to say, what do I 
want for poor people in America? How would I like for them to 
be able to live?
    And I think what we want for them is what we want for 
middle-class families and, indeed, for upper-income families in 
America. We want people to have strong families and successful 
work lives. We want them to succeed when they go to work and 
when they're working at raising their children. And we don't 
want them to have to choose; we want them to do both. And 
that's exactly what we want other families in America to do as 
well: Success at home and success at work. And if we have a 
system that undermines either one, America is weaker because of 
it.
    So we have worked hard. We've got 75 percent of everybody 
on welfare now under welfare-to-work experiments in a way that 
enables them to continue to support their children when they 
leave the welfare rolls and go onto the work rolls. And that's 
what we ought to want for every American. There are 1.3 million 
fewer people on welfare today than there were the day I became 
President. This will work. We can move people from welfare to 
work if we do it in the right way. [Applause.]
    The other big part of this is that people who owe it ought 
to pay their child support. [Applause.] When I became 
President, we were collecting $8 billion a year in child year. 
Now we're collecting 11 billion, a 40 percent increase. But you 
need to know that if every person in this country who owes 
support for their own children, is legally obligated to pay it 
and is financially able to pay it, if they paid it all 
tomorrow, tomorrow morning there would be 800,000 fewer women 
and children on welfare in the Untied States. So that's a big 
part of this and a big part of why we need national legislation 
to reform the welfare laws. [Applause.]
    So we're working hard with the Congress to try to get a 
welfare reform bill out so we can cover all the states, all the 
people and have even tougher child support enforcement, 
especially for the cases across state lines. But remember, when 
you hear this debate and you hear people propose certain 
things, ask yourself, what do I want for those families? And 
don't I want for them the same thing I want for the families in 
my neighborhood and the families of America, success at home 
and success at work? And I think if we think about it that way, 
we'll make the right decisions.
    Finally, let me say we have a responsibility to finish the 
work of balancing the budget, but to do it in a way that is 
consistent with our values and our long-term interests, which 
is, in my view, taking care of the health care needs of 
seniors, people with disabilities, poor children, making sure 
that we continue to invest in education and protecting the 
environment and other things that are critical to our future, 
making sure we do not increase the burdens on the hardest 
pressed working families. But we can do that, and I am 
committed to it.
    And lastly, we have a responsibility to maintain the 
national defense and to continue to be the world's strongest 
force for peace and freedom. [Applause.]
    As we enter the--near the end of the most successful draw-
down in our history, our military readiness has never been 
higher, we continue to have the best equipped, the best 
trained, the best prepared military in the world. And we must 
always have that. Whether we're standing down aggression in the 
Persian Gulf, restoring democracy in Haiti, safeguarding the 
peace in Bosnia, saving lives in Rwanda, working with NATO and 
our new allies from the former communist bloc in the 
Partnership for Peace, our service men and women have proven 
their abilities time and time again in the last three and a 
half years.
    Our funding and support for them must not falter, first for 
military technology to meet any new challenges now or in the 
future, and, even more important, to support the men and women 
in uniform, for they are the most precious resource in our 
military arsenal, and we have to be there for them. [Applause.]
    Last year we set aside funds to ensure that military 
personnel received the highest pay raise allowed by law through 
the end of the century. We are committed to maintain and 
improve the quality of life for service members and their 
families around the globe, including better housing, community 
support, youth programs and child care. They, too, have a right 
to know that if they're succeeding for us at their work, their 
homes are going to be successful, and their children and their 
spouses are going to be taken care of. And that is a very, very 
important part of defense spending in this world. [Applause.]
    There are a lot of things that we have to do for the 
future. We're working in Washington now to raise the minimum 
wage; to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill which will say you 
don't lose your health insurance if you change jobs or someone 
in your family gets sick. We're working hard on welfare reform.
    I hope that we can strengthen the Family and Medical Leave 
Law, which has permitted 12 million working Americans to take 
some time off when they've had a baby born or sick parent 
without losing their jobs. And I'd like to see more done so 
that people could go to regular doctor's appointments with 
their parents or their kids, or got to a parent-teacher 

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