From: U56503@uicvm.uic.edu
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,talk.politics.misc,sci.econ
Subject: ==> Clinton Speech: Economic Club Of Detroit
Date: 16 Oct 92 08:08:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: uicvm.92290.030807U56503
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
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Repost for new readers.

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GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON
ECONOMIC CLUB OF DETRIOT
DETROIT, MI
AUGUST 21, 1992

  Thank you very much.  Governor Blanchard and distinguished members and
guests of the Economic Club of Detroit.  I really appreciate that
introduction Jim gave me. After the going over I got last night, I need it.
But I'm always a little skeptical of those introductions where people talk
about being born in a log cabin they built themselves.  Most of that stuff
was way overrated, and those of us who experienced it were glad to escape
it.
  I am delighted to be here today.  I had looked forward to coming here for
a long time.  And I wanted to talk with you about my economic plans for the
future.  But of course now I also have to talk a little bit about what was
said last night by my opponent in this election.
  I want to talk to you about what's really at stake in this election: our
nation's economic future, and whether we can chart a new course in the
world economy with an economic strategy that will create jobs and raise
incomes.
  We have to make a choice to create a high-growth, smart-work, high-wage
economy, or whether to continue to drift into a low-growth, hard-work,
low-wage future.
  That is the real issue.  As the rabbi said, the test of presidential
character is whether we use the power of this office to help the American
people realize their potential.
  The test of family values is not whether Al Gore and I love our wives and
our children as much as George Bush and Dan Quayle do, but whether we get
up every day worrying about your children and your future.
   Today as we gather here in the city which was once the manufacturing
capital of the world, our economy is struggling and the American dream is
in trouble.  I come here to tell you forthrightly that I believe that
manufacturing is an important part of America's future, that the auto and
truck and high tech industries of Michigan are an important part of a
national manufacturing and economic strategy that we must have, and that
I'm here to commit to work, to strengthen our ability to grow and prosper.
  Ten years ago, our nation had the highest wages in the world. Now we're
13th and falling.  Last year Germany and Japan had productivity growth
rates that were three and four times ours because they educate their people
better, they invest more in their future, and they organize their economies
for global competition while we don't.
  Here at home, people who have jobs are working harder for lower pay.  The
United States census report documents that two-thirds of the American
working people are making lower wages today for longer work weeks than they
had ten years ago.
  People who don't have jobs are looking harder and harder to find fewer
jobs.  Middle class people are paying more for health care, housing,
education, and in taxes, and at the same time, poverty is exploding.
  There has been a stunning 50 percent increase in the percentage of our
work force, people who get up and go to work every day, who are in poverty.
10 percent of our country is on food stamps, welfare and Medicaid rolls are
growing at record rates.  Just last week we had the highest application
increase for unemployment benefits in over a decade.  And in spite of low
interest rates, housing starts have dropped off.
  Our leaders and their old ideas have failed us.  In the last 12 years
they have quadrupled the national debt and reduced our public investment in
the future.  For too long, the politicians in Washington have forgotten the
people who elected them, and nobody seems to be looking out for the country
and for the people who've made it great.
  We desperately need a president who will take responsibility for getting
this country moving again, provide the leadership to pull us all together,
and challenge this nation to compete in the world and win again.  A
president who will leave behind the failed Republican experiment and
trickle down economics on the one hand, but will not embrace the old
Democratic theory of tax and spend and regulate on the other.
  We have to move in a radically different direction. The old economic
ideas of the last two decades did not produce growth, did not create upward
mobility, and most important, didn't prepare millions and millions and
millions of our people to compete and win in this global economy.
  And yet time and again in recent years what have our leaders told us in
the most critical moments of need.  Twelve years ago here in this city we
heard a Republican candidate for president promise us he would cut taxes,
raise defense spending, and balance the budget all at the same time.  He
won and brought us a decade where our country was left mired in debt, our
economy declined, and inequality decreased.
     The ten largest deficits in the history of the United States occurred
during the last two presidents.  Four years ago, we heard a candidate for
president promise us in these four years 15 million jobs, a balanced
budget, never to raise taxes, no matter what.  He promised an environmental
presidency, an education presidency and a kinder, gentler country.  He
won--and since then, we've have the slowest years of growth in 50
years--the slowest income growth, the slowest job growth in 50 years; the
largest budget deficits in history; the highest middle-class tax burden;
and the first decline in industrial production in the history of the United
States.
  Now we can see that those promises were hollow and betrayed us.
  Last night, we heard that same candidate, desperate for re-election,
promise another short-term capital gains cut for the wealthy--the fool's
goal of an across-the-board tax cut in the face of a $400 billion deficit,
and a balanced budget amendment with no serious specific proposals to
balanced the budget.
  These promises, too, are false; and they, too, will betray us if we
follow them.
  In the words of the man who started all this, ``There they go again.''
  We've heard it all before, seen it all before, tried it all before.  It's
``read my lips'' all over again, except this time, we can read the record.
  Mr. Bush said not long ago that he would do whatever it takes to get
re-elected.  In his USA Today interview, he was asked why he wanted to be
president, and he said, ``Because I want it.''  Well, last night he proved
that he wanted it, and that he will keep his promise to do whatever it
takes to get elected.
  No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear
politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean
them--campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving
again.
  Last night proved something else:  George Bush is a lot more interested
in beating me than helping you.

  He couldn't say anything about his economic record, so he just says
anything to say in power.  Three years and seven months into the
presidency, he still has no agenda, no vision, no strategy--nothing to say
about creating jobs in America.  And in the last four years since he gave
an acceptance speech without a plan, but full of promises and gimmicks,
we've lost a million manufacturing jobs, wages have fallen further behind
our major competitors, and just this week, as I said, a record number of
Americans filed for unemployment.
  Three times as many Americans have filed for bankruptcy as have gotten
new jobs since the Bush administration began.
  Again, last night there was no plan to create jobs or raise incomes--just
more cynical read-my-lips promises.
  For the time in American history, more people are working in government
than in manufacturing, since this administration took place.  Now we have
more government bureaucrats the president deplores than the factory workers
he ignores.
  Across the country people are eager for real answers about how we can
create new jobs and save existing jobs, but the promises Mr. Bush made last
night are intended to save one job: his.
  In fact, the only new idea in his speech last night was to let people
check a box on their IRS form to contribute a portion of their taxes to pay
for the last 12 years of deficit, or for someone else's capital gains cut.
  The president said last night this election is about trust.  You bet it
is.  Four years ago, he said ``read my lips.'' And then signed the second
biggest tax increase in history.
  Last night he said some things about my record that he knew when he said
them were not true.  Read the Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Bush says I
proposed the largest tax increase in history.  The Journal told the truth,
it's one-third the size of the one he already signed.
  Mr. Bush says I want to tax everybody with a job.  The Journal told the
truth.  The richest 2 percent of Americans would be asked to pay their fair
share because their tax burdens went down in the 1980s.  And there would be
some modest tax relief to middle class Americans who are overburdened,
especially those raising their children.
  Mr. Bush says I raised taxes in Arkansas 128 times in 12 years and he
just raised them once.  The Journal told the truth when it said that attack
isinaccurate.  By Mr. Bush's own standard, he's raised taxes 78 times in
three years, and Arkansas still has the second lowest state and local tax
burden in the United States of America.
  How can you trust someone who's a Republican and won't even honor what
the Wall Street Journal says is the truth.
  He says my program is bad for the economy, but in Arkansas, we have
created manufacturing jobs at ten times the national average.  And the
average income has increase at twice the national rate since 1984.
  In the last year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have led
the nation in job growth.  He talks about deficit reduction, but his own
budget proposals in the last four budgets would actually have increased the
deficit by $1 billion over its present level, according to a study by the
House Appropriations Committee.
  Well, I balanced 11 budgets in a row, and still kept the second lowest
tax burden in America.  I know you have to make tough decisions.  I've had
to cut spending twice since I've been running for president.
  He talks about education.  But in Arkansas, we raised graduation rates
from 35th to 18th in the country, the highest in the South.  Raised the
college graduation rate from dead last to the national average, and ranked
fifth in the nation now in the percentage of our children with access to
computers in schools.
  I am a Democrat who believes in entrepreneurship and encouraging
investment, who understands and believes in market economics, who believes
in individual choice and hates bureaucracy.  We have a growth rate in
manufacturing jobs that we're proud of. We have a tax burden that we're
proud of. We also rank third in the nation in the percentage of our tax
that we devote to education. We moved 17,000 people from welfare to work,
we've given citizens more choices, in the public schools their children
attend, and in the long-term care facilities their parents have available
to them.
  We started the state government's first, state government-wide quality
management program to reduce bureaucracy and improve services. On the
question of trust, I ask you to remember that notwithstanding what was said
last night, and what has been clearly contradicted by the truth, one
candidate for president was governor of one of the poorest states in the
country and helped to move it forward.
  The other candidate stayed with trickle-down economics while American
problems worsened. This election is about trust, and I hope you will look
and see who can be trusted.
  Last night the president took credit for every victory
 which has occurred around the world since he's been president and refused
to take responsibility for any problem which has developed here at home
since he became president.
  I agree with him about one thing, the choice in this election is clear.
For 20 years, going across administrations we have been losing ground in
the productivity race in the world economy, but for the last 12 we have
been in the grip of a failed economic theory.
  This election is about whether we'll do what it takes to compete and win
in the global economy, whether we will rebuild America and invest in our
people, whether we'll build a high-skilled, high-wage, high-growth economy
that offers opportunity and hope to all of our people. We know what works,
investing in people, challenging the private sector to organize in new ways
to increase productivity, by putting business and labor, education and
government on the same side, and making an intense commitment to be
competitive in the global economy.
  I have issued a plan based on these fundamental principles. It's called
putting people first. And it's been endorsed by six Nobel prize winning
economists. It will create millions of jobs and cut the deficit by more
than 50 percent in four years.
  In degree and scope I believe it goes beyond what any presidential
candidate has ever offered during an election season. It goes far beyond
the little this president has done and far beyond the little he offered
last night.
  Not everyone in this room and certainly not everyone in our country could
agree with everything that I say.
  But my philosophy starts with the values that built America for all of
us, providing opportunity, taking responsibility, rewarding work,
encouraging entrepreneurship, investing in people and products, not paper
and perks.
  I reject brain-dead politics in both parties in Washington. The
wrongheaded Republican notion that prosperity will trickle down if we just
make the rich even richer, and get the government out of the way, and the
old Democratic orthodoxy that there is a program for every problem and that
we can tax and spend our way to prosperity.
  Instead I offer a new choice based on old values, opportunity, individual
responsibility, faith in family and hard work. I don't believe in big
government, but I do believe in an effective government that promotes jobs
and growth, and gives people more choices and better services, and inspires
more personal responsibility.
  I believe people on welfare ought to go to work and I've been doing
something about it in our state where we've moved 17,000 people from
welfare to work, and I have a plan to do even better, to end welfare as we
know it and make it a second chance, not a way of life.
  Mr. Bush didn't mention this in his acceptance speech last night, even
though caseloads on welfare nationwide have grown five times faster in the
last three and a half years than they did under Jimmy Carter or Ronald
Reagan.
  I believe in the toughest possible child support enforcement.
  I want a national system of national child support enforcement because
governments don't raise children; people do. And I think--
  I do believe that individuals should take responsibility for their own
actions and that includes the president of the United States.
  Of all the whoppers I heard last night, the biggest one wasn't even about
me. It came at the end when Mr. Bush compared himself to Harry Truman.
  Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said, ``The
buck stops here.''  If Mr. Bush had a similar sign on his desk, it would
say, ``Don't blame me, I'm just the president; the buck stops somewhere
else.''
  The funny thing is, I've gone further than Mr. Bush in spelling out what
I would do to change Congress, even though he's spent almost all his time
blaming Congress. Some time ago I called for a 25 percent cut in aggregate
congressional and White House staffs, an end to perks and privileges and
pay raises while the pay of American workers is going down. A line item
veto of the sort that's helped me to balance 12 budgets in a row.
  A limiting of the influence of PACs, cutting spending in congressional
campaigns, opening the airwaves to honest debate so incumbents don't have
an automatic ticket to reelection.
  But it will not matter who is sent to Congress if we don't put in a
leader in the White House who will take responsibility for fashioning the
direction this country must take.
  More than any other Democrat in this election cycle, I have tried to be
honest in my criticisms of Congress as an institution, even when it
affected members of my party. But let's be honest about the present logjam.
Congress passed an economic growth package, fashioned largely by a
pro-business Democrat, Senator Lloyd Bentsen from Texas, that included
strong incentives for new investment in plant and equipment, and
revitalizing the commercial real estate industry, getting small businesses
off the ground, and Mr. Bush vetoed the package even though it contained a
lot of things he had asked for, for one simple reason.
  It asked the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share, raising
maximum rates in the upper 2 percent to 35 percent, while giving modest
relief to the middle class. And that was the ground on which it was vetoed,
not because it didn't have incentives to get this economy going again.
  We have got to have a president who will take responsibility for moving
the economy, for putting Americans back to work. That's why I've offered a
national economic strategy to put people to work so that we can have an
expanding economy of high wage jobs here in our country.
  At the core of my plan there are four principles. First, we don't need
more trickle-down economics, instead we need more incentives for
productive, job creating investment. Mr. Bush's economic priority, the top
one, if just what it's always been: an across-the-board cut in short term
capital gains, a tax cut that gives a better benefit to millionaires, about
$100,000, but gives folks earning $50,000 a year less an average of $30.
  More importantly, it's a tax cut not targeted to long term investment and
activities that actually create jobs and emphasize new technologies. It
doesn't distinguish between building a business and buying a race horse.
It's just like the past 12 years of windfall without economic growth for
most Americans.
  Please understand me, I want to create more millionaires.  But I want to
do it the old fashioned way: by investing in America, and by having people
reap a reward in return for their investment in American jobs and American
goods and American services.
  That's why I recommended that we go beyond what the Congress did last
time and pass not a temporary, but a permanent investment tax credit to
encourage continuous reinvestment in new plant and productive equipment here
at home so that we can always be competitive in the global economy.
  I also propose a 50 percent tax break for those who take risks in making
five-year long-term investments in new business enterprises.  A permanent
research and development tax credit to reward companies which invest in
ground-breaking technologies, from high definition TV to high speed computing.
  I don't think we should subsidize the export of American jobs with tax
breaks.  And I favor getting rid of tax breaks for companies that shut down
their plants here and move them overseas.
  Again, I am not opposed to investment by American companies in other
countries.  I have sought the investment of foreign companies in my state.
But I have also examined the tax codes of our competitors.  And they don't
subsidize foreign investment, they subsidize domestic investment. We do the
reverse, and we should change policies and meet the competition.
    I also favor closing the tax loop hole that makes lobbying expenses
deductible.  And I do not believe that all executive compensation should be
deductible without regard to the productivity of the enterprise.
  For the last several years too many executives have failed to follow the
example of the president of Delta who recently rescinded his 21 percent pay
increase because his company was losing money. I don't care how much
anybody makes, as long as it's related to the growth of jobs and incomes.  But
we shouldn't have another decade where executive compensation goes up at four
times the rate of worker compensation and three times the rate of corporate
profits.  We ought to join hands and all go up or down together.  If we do
it, productivity and morale will increase in the workplace.
    The second thing we need to do is to invest in our own people, in their
education, their training and their health, to put our people first.  Our
economic future depends on our people's strengths and skills, their health
and their hopes.  If we're going to make America number one in the world
economically as well as politically, we've got to put our people first for
a change.  I have a plan to invest in lifetime learning for every American,
from pre-school to college to job training and retraining.  We should fully
fund the Head Start program and provide a pre-school opportunity for every
child who needs it.
  As a father and a student of education, I know that a life's work is done
on children by the time they start school, and we have too many who are
starting in unequal positions.  For people who don't go on to college, we
should provide--as our competitors all do--a two-year partnership between
education, government, employers and employees, an apprenticeship training
so people can get good jobs, not dead-end jobs, even if they don't have a
college education.
  We should open the doors to college education again, to all the people of
this country.  The cost of a college education is about the only essential
that's gone up more rapidly than health care costs in the '80s.  Under my
plan, we would scrap the existing student loan program and substitute for
it a National Service Trust Fund out of which any American could borrow the
money to go to college; but they would have to pay it back, either as a
small percentage of their income at tax time so they couldn't beat the
bill, as so many do today; or even better, by giving two years of service to
our nation here at home, rebuilding America.
  Just think of it:  if every person from Michigan who got a college degree
borrowed the money from the National Service Trust to get it and then
worked for two years at a reduced rate as a police officer, as a teacher, as a
nurse, in a housing program, working to keep kids out of trouble and off
drugs, we could solve half the problems of this country and educate a whole
generation of Americans.  It would be the best money we ever spent.
  I have a plan with a modest amount of money to establish a partnership
with the states to teach everybody with a job to read, and give everybody with
a job a chance to get a high school diploma or a GED in the next five years.
  That normally doesn't get thunderous applause, but it might be the
cheapest, quickest thing we could do to raise per capita income and
productivity in this country.
  My state only has 2.4 million people, but we spend as much money on adult
education as our neighbors in Texas do next door.  And we do it because we
believe it will help us to increase productivity and earnings.
  And I do have a plan to get tax incentives or impose payments on
businesses above a certain size--excluding small businesses--to retrain
their workers.  In the United States, as in all our competing nations, the
average company spends 1 to 1- 1/2 percent of payroll on retraining.  The
difference between the United States and Germany and Japan, where wages are
growing more rapidly and productivity's growing more rapidly, is that in
our country 70% of the expenditures are spent on the 10% of the employees at
the top of the corporate ladder.  Our competitors spread those expenditures up
and down and constantly retrain the work force.  At a time when you can
never guarantee anyone a lifetime job, and people will change work eight
times in a lifetime, even if they stay with the same company, it is
imperative that we have incentives to retrain the entire work force on a
regular basis to guarantee productivity and worker mobility.
  Lastly on this issue, I have a plan to tackle the single greatest problem
facing America's families, our businesses and our government--rising health
care costs. Entitlements now consume 43% of the federal budget, and the
overwhelming culprit is exploding medical costs, now budgeted for the
future
at 11-12% as year, with an assumption that inflation will be under five
percent.  Unless we find a way to control medical bills and provide a basic
system of affordable health care to all Americans, we are never going to
restore the full health to the manufacturing economy, remove the biggest
burden on small business, or get this government's deficit under control.
Health care costs are responsible for 80% off the strikes in America today,
not wages--health care disputes.
  Health care costs are adding well over $1,000 to automobiles.  Health
care costs have now gone for the average American family from $1,000 to $3,000
a year.  In 1980 we were spending $250 billion, this year we're spending $809
billion. If we don't do something about health care costs they'll be over
17% of our GNP by the end of the decade; today they're over 13%, 30% higher
than our nearest competitor.
  And I tell you, my fellow Americans, that's one reason the average German
factory worker can make 20% more than the average American for a shorter
work week, because they kept health costs under inflation for the last six
years.
  Contrary to the assertion that Mr. Bush made last night, I want to
preserve what's best in the present system-- your family's right to choose
the doctors and hospitals and medical providers or your own choice.
  But if we're going to nurse this system back to health we are going to
have to make some tough decisions.  In America only 84 cents of the
insurance dollar goes to health care, 16 cents to administration and profit
and paperwork.  In Europe it's 95 cents.  One reason is, there is a system
to mandate broad based community rating so insurance companies make money
like grocery stores--a little bit of money on a lot of people.
  Another reason is, there is a simple, basic package of comprehensive
benefits which must be offered, either by private insurers or by the
government so that you simplify paperwork and administrative burdens
dramatically.
  The third thing we've got to do is to give people incentives to engage in
managed care network so that managed competition can work to reduce the
cost of health care.
  Fourthly, we need to extend the availability of primary and preventive
care and health education in the inner cities and the rural areas of this
country.  We are wasting a fortune because we don't do it.
  Paperwork and bureaucracy and regulation alone add 80 to 100 billion dollars
in unnecessary costs to this system.  The average doctor spends over 30% of
income on paperwork, the average hospital is hiring clerical workers at four
times the rate of nurses.  We can do better.  Lest you think we can't, I cite
not only the German example, but the state of Hawaii, which has community
rating, primary health clinics, broad-based groups of health care providers,
and which charges 50 percent less for health insurance than the American
average. We can do it if we have the will to do it.

  The third principle is that we have to invest today in the foundations of
tomorrow. I was criticized last night for wanting to invest 220 billion new
dollars over the next four years.  My opponent didn't point out that I also
called for $140 billion of spending cuts over the next four years.
  We need to increase real investment of your tax dollars by $50 billion a
year because all our competitors are doing more.  Nine nations now spend a
higher percentage of their income on kindergarten through 12th grade
education than we do.
  Virtually every country in the world with an advanced economy spends a
much higher percentage of their income on infrastructure, on transportation
and communications than we do. And we have got to compete.  We've got to
rebuild our railroads, our highways, our bridges, invest in a national
information network to link every library and every laboratory.  And every
classroom and every company, and every home by the year 2015.
  Wouldn't it be nice when our kids come home, if they could have computers
that link them up to the Library of Congress, not just a video game?
    We need to take every last dollar by which we reduce defense and
reinvest it in an American economy for the 21st century, creating high speed
rail networks, creating new environmental technologies, investing in new
technologies that will permit us to retrain workers who do lose their jobs
for even better jobs in the future, not leave them out in the cold just
because they won the Cold War.
    Every dollar by which we reduce research and development in the
military should be reinvested in civilian research and development, and we
should have similar partnerships in new high technology opportunities in the
private sector, in the commercial sector, that we have had for years in the
military sector.
  We've had a national economic strategy for high tech growth in military
weaponry, because we didn't want it produced overseas, and we have led the
world.  WE need to do the same thing in the new technologies of the 21st
century.

  Fourth and finally, I propose a national economic strategy based on
building America's team.  Bringing together business and labor, government
and education to compete and win. Mr. Bush sits at the head of a government
that is the only advanced industrial nation in the world, the only one,
which doesn't stand up for its businesses and workers and jobs with a
national economic strategy.
  I don't believe in government picking winners and losers.  But our
government should do what it takes to help American businesses and workers
become winners in the world economic competition.
  It isn't any accident that 28 percent of the Japanese work force and 32
percent of the German work force are in manufacturing, and we are all the
way down to 16 now in the United States.
  I want to promote American industry again.  And I don't think there is a
real choice to be made between trade and jobs if we have the right kind of
trade policy.  We need both. I am not a protectionist.  But I don't want to
be a pushover.
  I want us to be able to expand trade.  I want us to expand our trade and
investment with Mexico.  I want a big market.  We may need it for defensive
purposes as Europe gives signals of becoming more protectionist.  But I
know that we have to be fair to our workers, to our environment, and to our
future.  We can do both if we are committed to growth through expanded
trade and fair trade, and if we realize that no nation on earth has free
trade.
  When rules are fair and markets are open, American companies can compete
and win.
  I want to use the powers of the presidency to make those rules fair.  I
think we should pass a stronger and sharper so-called Super 301 trade bill
so that if other countries refuse to play by our rules, we can play by
theirs.
    I think our foreign policy should be focused much more on international
economic policy, and I think we need an economic security council similar
to the National Security Council, with responsibility for coordinating our
economic policy.  Maybe if we had had such a focus in the recent example,
the Treasury secretary Mr. Brady would not have given the Japanese a $300
million windfall by reclassifying multipurpose vehicles as cars instead of
trucks.
  As much as I believe in expanded trade, I can't, and I shouldn't protect
companies which won't organize to compete and win.  But we shouldn't sit
back and let companies that are increasing productivity at astonishing
rates get clobbered in the world markets because of unfair practices and a
president who won't stand up.
  With a national economic strategy, we won't have to choose between clean
air and clean water, and good jobs.  Mr. Bush's friends in Houston said
that clean air and clean water are incompatible with a growing economy.  I
disagree with that. Reminded me of something a fellow from around here,
Walter Reuther, used to say--that they may be looking at the future through
their rearview mirrors.

The fact is, there is a growing market here in America and all across the
world for equipment and services that can serve energy and clean air and
water, and preserve the planet. The market for environmental technology and
services is already over $200 billion a year.  Developing nations will
likely install--listen to this--a trillion dollars worth of this type of
gear--just in the developing nations--in the next 15 years. That's why the
Germans and the Japanese came to the earth summit at Rio, hawking their
wares, doing their best to sell environmental technology all over the
world, while the United States said we couldn't any of the targets that they
can meet.
  That may be why foreign companies now have 70 percent of the American
market for environmental technology.  All those defense workers should have
put to work doing that starting back in the mid-'80s when we began to make
these defense cuts; and we'd be in better shape today, if that had
happened.
   Let me say, finally, I don't have all the answers. I'm not a dogmatic
person, but I am passionate about seeing this country fulfill its God-given
capacities.  Every day I wake up and worry about the people that can't
educate their children or pay their medical bills, or the businesses that
are doing fine but they're being crushed by the crazy elements in our
system or by manufacturers that are increasing productivity at 4 percent a
year and still can't make a go of that.  I worry about that.
  And I remember that the genius and greatness of America is that at
crucial times in our history, we have always been able to reinvent ourselves.
Sixty years ago, in the midst of a greater crisis, Franklin Roosevelt said
this.  ``This country needs--and unless I mistake its temper--this country
demands bold, persistent experimentation.  It is common sense to take a method
and try it, and, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another.  But above
all, try something.
  President Roosevelt defined the ultimate test of economic leadership in
an exciting and dynamic time:  the willingness to take bold action to improve
the lives of the people you serve.  Six decades later, this administration's
worst failure is not the devastating recession that has occurred on Mr. Bush's
watch.  It is that we have had this recession and he has done nothing but
watch.
    He has failed to meet the standard he himself set the day he took
office to use the power of the presidency to help people.  As Roger Johnson,
the chairman of Western Digital Corporation and a Republican supporter of mine
said on national television ten days ago, I think we've got some problems
in our country.  We've had them for some time.  President Bush has had over 3{
years to address them, and just hasn't shown the leadership to take us out
of them.  He spent a good bit of that 3{ years telling us there wasn't a
recession, as recently as a few weeks ago.  Then we found out there was a
recession.
  I offer a vision of millions of jobs and thousands of new companies in
dozens of new industries--a vision of economic growth that starts by
investing in our people, their health, their education and their skills;
and a vision of presidential leadership that challenges every student and
every worker and every business person to do their best so that we can compete
and win again in the world marketplace of the 21st century.
     Today if we put our people first, we can
fulfill the historic obligation of Americans to always be prepared to
recreate the strength of the American community and to reaffirm our belief
that tomorrow can be better than today.  We do not have a person to waste.
And as my wife never tires of saying, Life is not a dress rehearsal. We are
letting too many opportunities and too many lives and too many futures go.
We must have the courage in this election to change course.
  Thank you very much.
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton