pd16my94 Proclamation 6684--National Walking Week, 1994...

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    Thank you very much. Lou, you are certainly richer than I am, but 
that ain't saying much. [Laughter] If only the people who weren't were 
compelled to stay here and the

[[Page 1019]]

rest of you could leave, we could hold this meeting in a closet. 
[Laughter]
    I am delighted to be here. And I thank Senator Moynihan for coming 
with me, and I'm glad to see the Members of Congress who are here. I see 
Representative Maloney and Congressman Schumer, but I have been told 
that Congressmen Nadler, Towns, King, and Serrano are here. They may not 
be, but that's what I've been told. If they're not, don't be 
embarrassed. They've heard this speech before. [Laughter] Charles Rangel 
is on our official delegation, along with the Vice President and Mrs. 
Gore and the First Lady, to the Inauguration of Nelson Mandela. So 
that's why he's not here. And I think that my national economic adviser 
Bob Rubin and my Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes are also here. I 
thank them for coming with me. I never like to come to New York alone. 
[Laughter]
    Let me say--Lou Rudin has already mentioned this, but unless you had 
been there, you cannot imagine what an astonishing thing it was that the 
House of Representatives passed that ban on assault weapons. And if it 
hadn't been for Charles Schumer lighting that little candle in the 
darkness when everybody else said it was dead, it was over, there was no 
chance, we would never have made it. It was an astonishing thing.
    It just shows you that democracy can work, that systems can change, 
that things can change. But you have to work at it, and you have to be 
willing to fight those battles that don't always end in a landslide. We 
won by two votes on this one. That's twice the margin we had on the 
economic plan last year. [Laughter] But when these things come up, it's 
important to take the position, stake it out, and try to change. And 
there are a lot of wonderful stories; I wish we had time to tell them 
all today.
    I'd also like to say I'm glad to be back before this organization. 
About 8 years ago, I spoke to ABNY when I was the Governor of Arkansas 
and I was organizing a group of southern Governors to support the 
continuing deductibility for State and local income taxes. Remember 
that? And you had something to do with me coming here.
    I remember--I liked that better then, because I was--at home we call 
that preaching to the saved; everybody agreed with what I was saying. 
They thought, what is this crazy guy from a little State doing up here 
taking a position that may be against his own economic interest? I 
thought it was the right thing to do then in the interest of federalism; 
I still believe it was the right thing to do. But I remember well that 
fine day that I had the first opportunity to see this remarkable 
organization.
    Today I want to say a few words about the health care debate in 
which the Congress is involved and in which many of your Members will 
play a pivotal role, none more than Senator Moynihan because he's the 
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. But I'd like to put it in the 
context of all the other things that are going on.
    We're at one of those rare moments in history in which, while we 
clearly have serious responsibilities around the world, ones that we 
have to meet in new and different and innovative ways, we also have an 
opportunity to look at ourselves very clearly and to try to strengthen 
ourselves from the grassroots as we move toward the next century; one 
that I think will be an exciting world of more open trade borders and 
constantly changing economies; one that will, to be sure, still be full 
of danger and disappointment but one that can give the American people 
an astonishing amount of opportunity if we do what it takes to play a 
leading role and to give all of our people a chance to live up to their 
full potential.
    We can only do that, in my judgment, if we find ways of facing our 
problems and building our bridges to the rest of the world by being 
faithful to our traditional values and adapting them to the world toward 
which we are going, by giving our citizens the freedom they need to make 
the most of the opportunities they'll find, and demanding that all of us 
take responsibility for our common future by strengthening our families, 
our education system, and our system of work, and by rewarding the work 
of citizens by telling people that if they do what it takes to compete 
and win, they will have a chance to do just that.
    We can't allow our people to be helpless in the faces of the changes 
that are coming, a world in which the average 18-year-old will literally 
change work seven or eight times.

[[Page 1020]]

Giving them the confidence and the capacity to embrace those changes is 
a big part of my job as President as we move toward the end of this 
century. We've fought hard for an economic strategy that will create a 
more stable and more prosperous America, beginning with an understanding 
that the private sector is the engine of wealth creation and job 
creation.
    Last year, the Congress passed, against enormous opposition and the 
threat of recurrent gridlock, the largest deficit reduction plan in 
history. We used honest numbers, and Congress and the President didn't 
argue over whether I had given them unrealistic budget assumptions. We 
proposed real cuts, and soon, we will cut our deficit in half.
    This year or next year, our deficit in America, as a percentage of 
our annual income will be smaller than any of the other major industrial 
countries in the world. That is a huge turnaround from the 1980's.
    If the Congress adopts the budget before it now, and it's passing at 
a record rate, 100 Federal programs will be eliminated, 200 others will 
be cut, and we will have 3 years of declining deficits for the first 
time since Harry S. Truman was President of the United States. That is 
one of the reasons, along with the enormous changes which have been made 
in the private sector in this country, that consumer confidence is up, 
investment is up, productivity is up, and inflation is down.
    Last week, we learned that last month our economy produced over a 
quarter of a million new jobs and has produced about a million in the 
first 4 months of this year. Over the last 15 months, the economy has 
produced about 3 million new jobs, nearly all of them in the private 
sector, again, a rather marked departure from the experience of the last 
few years when a very significant percentage of the jobs were created by 
Government.
    Now, we know that there are still a lot of problems. There are still 
a lot of people who want work, who don't have it. There are still a lot 
of sections of the country that are lagging behind. But we are moving in 
the right direction.
    Last year, the Congress also, working with me, gave us what most 
experts said was the most productive first year of the Presidency, 
either since Lyndon Johnson's first year or Eisenhower's first year, 
depending on how they count in Washington; I can never quite keep up 
with it. But anyway, we had a good year. We passed the family and 
medical leave act after 7 years of gridlock. We passed the Brady bill 
after 7 years of gridlock. And it is already beginning to save lives. It 
is beginning to have an impact.
    We dramatically expanded a provision of the Tax Code called the 
earned-income tax credit, which is designed to lower taxes for working 
people with children who hover right at or just above the poverty line. 
It is, in many ways, the biggest incentive we have for people to stay 
off welfare and stay at work, by saying that the tax system will not tax 
you into poverty, instead, it will reward your willingness to work.
    We have a lot to do in the area of education and training. But 
already this year the Congress has passed two of the three legs of our 
comprehensive education program: first, the Goals 2000 bill, which gives 
us national education standards written into the law of the United 
States for the first time in the history of the Republic, supported by 
grassroots reforms and all kinds of incentives to achieve them in our 
public schools; and the school-to-work legislation, which will begin to 
establish a network in America of education and training for people who 
do not wish to go on to 4-year colleges but must have some further 
training after they leave high school in order to be competitive in the 
global economy and get good jobs with growing incomes.
    Still to be done is changing the unemployment system into a 
reemployment system. Most of you who are employers pay an unemployment 
tax for a system that's been out of date for some time now, a system 
that assumes that when people lose their jobs they're just laid off 
temporarily and they'll be called back. So the unemployment taxes 
provide a pool of money to support people at a lower level than their 
wage but a sustainable level until they are called back. But the truth 
is most people are not called back to their old jobs today. And so we 
need to transform this system from an unemployment system to one that 
begins immediately to retrain

[[Page 1021]]

and replace people for new jobs in the economy.
    Finally, something that Senator Moynihan has worked on a long time, 
we have to complete the work of welfare reform. In the end we are going 
to have to end the system as we know it. We are going to have to say, 
we'll provide education and training, we'll have a fair Tax Code, we'll 
have health care coverage for your kids. Once we do all these things, 
the system itself should come to an end at some point, and people should 
be provided work opportunities which take precedence over welfare.
    One other thing I have to say, since we've all clapped for 
Congressman Schumer, is the crime bill has not passed yet. It's passed 
the House and it's passed the Senate, but they haven't agreed on a bill. 
And it is a very big deal for New York. The crime bill will have another 
100,000 police officers. You have already seen in this city the evidence 
that crime can go down if you have neighborhood policing with real 
connections to the community. This 100,000 police officers will help to 
do this. It provides more funds for States for punishment and for 
alternative forms of punishment and more funds for prevention. And now 
it will provide the assault weapons ban. But it has not passed yet. And 
it is very important that we keep up the pressure to get the two sides, 
the Senate and the House, together to make an agreement, get the bill 
out quickly, and pass it as quickly as possible so that we can begin to 
show the benefits to the American people on the streets where they live. 
All these things are now in progress.
    As proud as I am of all this, I have to tell you that it will not be 
enough to help us to deal with our present problems or seize our future 
opportunities, in my judgment, unless we deal with the health care 
situation in America, a crisis that has engulfed millions of people and 
stories that my wife and I have heard in letters and personal 
encounters, one that threatens the future stability of the Federal 
budget, one that threatens these fine teaching institutions you have 
here in New York and indeed the whole very fabric of our American 
community.
    I wish I could just share with you any number of the unbelievable 
numbers of letters that I have received from middle class America and 
sometimes upper middle class Americans who lost their health insurance 
or who have a child with diabetes or the mother had an early breast 
cancer or the father had an early stroke, and they've got a preexisting 
condition and they can never change jobs again, or the number of small 
businesses who tried so hard to cover their employees, but their 
premiums went up 35 percent and 40 percent a year.
    I can tell you this: This budget I sent to the Congress--to give you 
an idea of the budget implications of the health care crisis--the budget 
I sent to the Congress cuts defense quite a lot. I think it cuts it as 
much as it should, and I hope it won't be cut another dollar right now 
with the challenges we face in the Pacific and elsewhere. But defense 
has been brought down dramatically since 1987.
    This budget cuts overall discretionary domestic spending for the 
first time since 1969. We still spend money, more money on Head Start, 
on education programs, on women's health programs, on medical research, 
on education and training, and on new technology. Why? Because we 
eliminate 100 programs and cut 200 others. So we increase spending on 
the things we should, but overall domestic, discretionary spending is 
cut in the budget I sent to the Congress, for the first time since 1969. 
And still, if we adopt this budget in 1996 or '97, the deficit will 
start to go up again. Why? One reason only: Because health care costs in 
the Government's programs, Medicaid for poor people, Medicare for the 
elderly, are going up at 2 and 3 times the rate of inflation. So that, 
by the end of this decade, you will have pared down the defense system 
as much as it can possibly be pared down, you will have cut domestic 
spending, in many of our eyes, more than it should be cut, given the 
level of public investment we need in infrastructure and other things, 
and we will still have a rising deficit only because the only thing that 
will be going up in this budget is Medicare and Medicaid.
    And at the same time, we find more and more of our finest teaching 
hospitals having more and more budget problems because people are being 
forced by their employers

[[Page 1022]]

into managed care networks, and they're pulling out of more expensive 
care. And more and more folks are showing up at the door without health 
care coverage, uncompensated. This system eventually is going to cost 
everybody.
    Now, the institutions of health care in this city, as Senator 
Moynihan never tires of telling me are the finest in the world. And New 
Yorkers have set standards for expanding coverage and for returning 
insurance to what it was meant to be: a fair deal at a fair price. I 
know that Governor Cuomo, especially, has worked very hard at the State 
level to control costs by keeping people healthy, not just by treating 
them when they're sick. A lot of things have been done. But it is clear, 
I believe, to everyone who studies this problem that until we find a way 
to provide health care security for all of our people and to ask 
everyone to bear a fair share of personal responsibility for the cost of 
health care, we are not going to be able to deal adequately with the 
institutional problems that we face.
    What I have recommended is a system which is the most conservative 
change I think we can make, building on what we have: asking all 
employers who do not presently cover their employees or who have very 
limited coverage to pay a fair share of their employees' health care 
overage and asking the employees to pay some as well. I think that is a 
fair thing to do.
    I just left one of your distinguished retail operations here, a big 
food chain headed by Mr. Jack Futterman, who is here. He joined with 
Doug Dority, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers 
today to advocate our requirement, our proposed requirement, that all 
employers who don't cover their employees at least made some 
contribution to their employees' health care and that employees also 
make some contribution.
    If we don't do something to provide universal coverage, if we don't 
do something to have a system in which everyone has health security, 
you're going to see more and more and more of the present problems. 
Today in America, 100,000 employees a month lose their health care 
coverage for good. Today in America, millions of people, 81 million 
Americans to be exact, 81 million in a country of 255 million, live in a 
family where someone has had a preexisting condition. And what that 
often means is that the person either can't get health insurance or the 
person is locked into the job they're in because they can never change 
jobs. Because if you change jobs and go to another job, the new employer 
won't be able to cover you. This is going to become a bigger problem as 
big employers downsize and more and more new jobs are created by smaller 
employers. The structural changes in the American economy are going to 
accelerate this problem of providing affordable health insurance.
    So what are we going to do to change it? Many of the people who are 
opposed to this say, ``Well, you're going to break small business if you 
require them to pay anything.'' The truth is most small businesses pay 
something for health insurance, but their premiums, on average, are 35 
percent higher than larger business or Government. They're getting hurt 
by it.
    The truth is, if you have a chain of food stores, like the one I 
visited today, and they cover their employees, they're at a competitive 
disadvantage to people who don't. But many do it anyway. And it isn't 
just the 39 million Americans who don't have health insurance; it's all 
the other people who are at risk of losing theirs.
    If you think about it, very few people in American today have 
absolute security that they can never lose their health insurance, very 
few people. You have to either work for Government because you think 
Government will be there until the end of time and you think you'll 
always have that job, which may not be predictable because governments 
are downsizing, too, now, or you have to work for a company that is not 
only big and strong but one you're convinced will never downsize or at 
least won't downsize on you.
    So this is an issue that affects all Americans. If you believe that 
everyone should have access to health care coverage, as they do in every 
other advanced economy except ours, there are only a couple of options. 
You could do what the Canadians do and say, ``We'll have a private 
health care system, but it will be publicly financed.'' That's what we 
do with Medicare in America. We have a payroll tax and we pay for the 
health care of

[[Page 1023]]

elderly people, and then they pay something for their health care 
depending on what they can afford to pay. It seems to me that that was 
the most dramatic change we could make, because that would actually just 
basically take all private health insurers out of the system, and it 
would remove the kind of incentives you have in a country like Germany, 
for example, where employers and employees have a vested interest in 
trying to continue to keep up the pressure to hold down health care cost 
increases.
    So I rejected that approach. If you're not going to do it that way 
through taxes, then people have to pay for it who don't have it now. And 

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