Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much, Bill Lanthripp, for that introduction. Thank you, President Paloumpis, and thank you, ladies and…”

“Thank you very much, Bill Lanthripp, for that introduction. Thank you, President Paloumpis, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for making me feel so very, very welcome here today. I also want to thank those of you who brought the little children here; it's wonderful to see them--that little girl back there in her green dress and that little girl there, this young man there; you look great. Thank you. I want to thank some of my partners in trying to make your future better who are here with me, your Governor and Lieutenant Governor, Lawton Chiles and Buddy McKay. I thank my friend Congressman Gibbons for being here, the speaker of the house, Peter Wallace, and your representative, the majority leader of the house, Jim Davis. I thank them all for being here. I also want to say that I almost got here in time--I got here a day ahead of the new mayor's inauguration, so I want to thank, on the next- to-the-last day of her tenure, my longtime friend, your mayor, Sandy Freedman, for doing such a good job for Tampa. And I want to wish your new mayor, Dick Greco, all the best, and I look forward to working with you. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could start on a more serious note, I just had the opportunity to meet at the airport with the families of the two Tampa police officers, Mike Vigil and Kevin Howell, who were shot and wounded last week. I also had the opportunity to meet an HCC student, Mike Meyer, who saved one of those officers' lives because he's a certified emergency medical technician. He told the police he was a paramedic, and they brought him there. He grabbed his bag and rushed to the fallen officers, and he did a very fine job. And I had a chance to thank him for that, and it's an encouragement to all of us to learn some of the skills that he knows. You never can tell when you will need them. I understand that Officer Vigil remains in critical but stable condition, but I was just informed by his family that the doctors say his chances are now better than 50-50 that he's going to make a good recovery. I am delighted to be back in Florida. I had the opportunity to spend the night at the Governor's mansion last night and to address the Florida Legislature today about the challenges facing our country and what we're going to do about it. Today I want to talk to you about your future. I spend a lot of time in community colleges like this one, because I think in many ways this is the most important institution in American society as we move toward the next century. With all of the challenges we face, we basically know what works. What works is educating all of our people; what works is doing what it takes to generate more jobs; what works is bringing people together across racial and income and other lines; what works is a commitment to give more people a shot at the American dream, to grow the middle class and to shrink the under class, and to prepare for the future. And that's what community colleges do. In a very real sense, what I have been trying to do as President is to bring that spirit and those ideas into the National Government. I've worked for a dozen years as a Governor, in which time I had the honor and privilege to spend countless hours in educational institutions, from elementary schools to community colleges, to vocational training schools, to our 4-year universities. And I found when I went to Washington that every reason that I worried about the country when I ran for President turned out to be true. I ran because I thought this country was on the verge of a new century, dominated by the end of the cold war, the emergence of the global economy, wealth tied more to knowledge than ever before, when we had new opportunities but new challenges, and that Washington was in the grip of old-fashioned partisan political rhetoric, dividing us when we needed to be united, holding us back when we needed to go forward. Now we are all engaged in a great debate which you hear every day on the news as you watch events unfold about what your Government should be doing in this moment. The old view was that there was a Government solution in Washington for every big problem in the country and that Government could actually help people with big problems. Well, we know that that's not exactly right; they're not one-size-fits-all, Government knows best, out of Washington. And we know that there are great limits on how much Government can help people to fulfill their abilities. The new rage is to say that the Government is the cause of all of our problems and if only we had no Government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense. Now, the truth is--so the question is, what are we going to do? I can tell you what my view is, and it is different from either extreme. I believe we need a Government that doesn't pretend to be a savior but that doesn't sit on the sidelines. I believe in a partnership. I believe that the National Government's mission at the end of this century is as follows: Number one, we ought to be creating opportunity and demanding responsibility. Number two, I think we ought to be doing everything we can to empower the American people through education for a lifetime to make the most of their own lives. Number three, I believe we ought to be enhancing the security of the American people, not only by making the world a safer place but by making our streets and our schools and our homes and our workplaces safer places. And number four, I think we have got to dramatically change the National Government to make it smaller, less bureaucratic, less meddlesome, but still helpful to move this country forward. Now, if you look at the record in creating opportunity, we have brought down the deficit, we have expanded trade, we have increased our investments in new technology, and in the last 2 years our Nation has produced over 6 million new jobs. The unemployment rate in Florida has dropped 3 percent from 7.4 to 4.3 percent. We are clearly moving forward and creating more opportunity. If you look at the empowerment issue, we have increased investments in education, everything from expanding Head Start to expanding the efforts of States to make apprenticeships for people who don't go to college, to dramatically--and I mean dramatically--increasing the availability of scholarships for middle class people to get a higher education. If you ask, well, what have we done on security, well, look around the world. We are making progress in troublesome areas of the world like the Middle East, in bringing peace, and Northern Ireland. We have made agreements with Russia and with other countries in the former Soviet Union to drastically reduce the number of nuclear weapons. And for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no nuclear missiles pointed at the children of the United States of America. Now, if you ask what have we done to reduce the size of Government-- and I want to compliment Governor Chiles for his leadership in this. Florida is one of the--really, the groundbreaking State in America, I think, in slashing unnecessary regulation, and I congratulate him on that. What are we doing in Washington? Well, we've reduced the size of the Federal bureaucracy by 100,000. We're going to reduce it by 270,000 over 5 years. It'll be the smallest Federal Government since John Kennedy was President of the United States. We have reduced the Government deficit so much that if it weren't for interest on the debt incurred in the 12 years before I showed up, we'd have a surplus today, not a deficit in the Government account. We're paying our operating bills. We're now giving Government regulators the authority not to fine people the first time they make a mistake. And Carol Browner, from Florida, who's the head of the EPA, has opened up an office in which people, good, honest business people can go and say, ``Look, I'm afraid I'm in violation of some environmental law,'' and instead of getting a fine they'll get 6 months to fix it. We have changed the rules so that now if somebody makes a mistake in good faith, our Federal agencies have the right not to fine people but to say, ``You keep the fine if you'll spend it in fixing the problem, making the workplace safer, making the environment cleaner.'' So we are moving forward. With this new Congress, we are finding some areas of agreement that are quite important. I signed a law that I campaigned for President to support that applies to Congress all the laws they put on the private sector. I think it's high time. I signed a law the other day which limits the ability of the Congress to impose upon State governments and local governments so- called unfunded mandates, requiring them to raise your taxes because of something people in Washington want, instead of what you decided the mayor should do or the Governor and the State legislature should do. And it's high time. And we're about to get agreement--we passed a line-item veto, which most Governors have, which allows a President to go into a big bill, where a lot of pork-barrel spending might be hidden with a lot of good things so you can't afford to veto the bill, and find the pork. And we're going to get that passed soon. And that's a good thing. But there still are some disagreements. And the American people, without regard to their party, will have to be heard on these disagreements, because you have to decide what you think the main mission of our country is. Is the main mission to make sure there is no Federal Government, or is the main mission to grow the middle class, shrink the under class, and support family and community and the future of this country? I think that is what the main mission of this country is. And let me give you some ideas. With all the cutting of the budget we have done--and last year, I gave the Congress the first budget in 25 years that cut defense and domestic spending together. Only medical costs went up because of inflation. Everything else was cut. But I did not cut, within that, education. We increased our investment in education. Why? Because--look around you--it is the future of America. So are we going to grow the middle class, shrink the under class, and be a safer country if more poor little kids go through Head Start? I think we are. Are we going to grow the middle class if more kids who get out of high school but don't want to go to college at least get 2 years of some kind of training afterward in a community college, that type of thing? I think we are. Will we be growing the middle class and shrinking the under class if every person who wants to go to college can get a college loan at a lower cost and a better repayment schedule? I think we are. So this is a big decision we have to make in Washington. Let me give you a clear, explicit example. I recommended that we could save some money and do a better job by our young people if we changed the college loan program, because it was a big bureaucracy. You know it was a guarantee, so the Government would guarantee a loan a bank would give you. The bank charges a fee; then if somebody doesn't pay it back, the bank gets 90 percent of the money from the Government. So they never sue, because the lawyer fee would cost more than 10 percent. Right? We were spending, when I became President, $1.8--$2.8 billion a year of your money for delinquent loans, because people weren't paying their student loans. Colleges and universities were complaining all over America that the paperwork was driving them bananas to process the student loans. The students were complaining that they couldn't get the loans in a hurry. And then when they had to repay them on a 10-year schedule, if you borrowed a whole bunch of money, you couldn't take a job that you might want if it has a salary so low you could never make your loan repayment. And it didn't just apply to people in what you call public service jobs. Yesterday in Atlanta, I had an economic forum, and I had two married medical students, a husband and wife from the University of Florida, come and testify. They are 4th-year medical students. They will owe $140,000 when they get out of medical school. You say, ``Well, doctors make a lot of money.'' They do, but not when they're residents. Right? They were going to literally have to spend one-half of their income, combined, paying off their students loans while they're residents working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. Under our plan, they can pay it off as a percentage of their income. So when they start making money, they pay more. But now they get to make a living and work and become doctors. It's a better system. So how does this affect you? Today, 40 percent of American institutions are eligible to participate in that. What I said is, let's let everybody participate. We'll cut the fraud rate. We've already taken it from $2.8 billion down to $1 billion a year. We've cut the fraud by nearly two-thirds. We'll cut the cost of the program. We'll loan more money to more students. We'll be less trouble to the institutions of higher education, and the deficit will go down because we'll save $6 billion. That was my proposal. Now, here is the other proposal in the Congress. The other proposal is: Leave the banks with the money; cap the number of colleges that can participate at 40 percent; and instead, make students start paying interest on their loans while they're in college--add $2 billion a year to the cost of college. Audience members. No-o-o!”