Bill Clinton: “And--did you laugh at me or what you said? [Laughter] Listen, as one of them, I don't think it's too funny, myself.…”

“And--did you laugh at me or what you said? [Laughter] Listen, as one of them, I don't think it's too funny, myself. [Laughter] And the Social Security payroll tax will not be sufficient to cover Social Security payments by 2013. By 2032, the Trust Fund will run out of money. Meanwhile, we're all living longer and depending more on sophisticated technology, so Medicare is projected to not cover its costs by 2010. Now, I believe we can debate within the Congress, within the Democrats and Republicans, exactly how we're going to fix Medicare and how we're going to fix Social Security, but I know one thing: You're not going to fix big, sweeping demographic changes like this without some money. And so what I propose to do is to save this portion of the surplus, about a little over 60 percent for Social Security, 15 percent for Medicare for 15 years, and while we're doing it, to buy back the public debt with the money we're saving, because we don't need to spend it right now. Now, if we do that, we will not only be able to save Social Security and Medicare in a way that will prevent the baby boomers from putting an impossible burden on our children and our grandchildren, which I can tell you as the oldest of the baby boomers is something that my generation constantly worries about, that when we all retire the cost of our retirement will be too burdensome on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. It will not only do that. It will enable us to pay down our debt. Now, if anybody had ever told you 5 or 6 years ago we'd even have a conversation about paying down the debt, you'd probably thought they had slipped a gasket. But I'd like to tell you why it's important. We just presented a budget to Congress. Before we do anything with that budget, we have to pay interest on the national debt. The national debt quadrupled between 1981 and 1993. When I took office, it was taking over 14 cents of every dollar just to pay interest. Every time you pay a dollar in tax to the Federal Government, before we can spend it on the United States military--including the Army Band who were magnificent today--before we can spend it on education, before we can spend it on the environment, before we can spend it on health care, before we can spend it on a tax cut, before we can do anything with it, we had to take over 14 cents on the dollar and pay interest on the debt. And they told me, my economists, that it wouldn't be anytime until we'd be up to over 20 cents on the tax dollar in interest. Now, if you save this much money for 15 years, it will take our public debt from 50 percent, where it was when I took office, of our annual income, down to 7 percent of our annual income. It will be the lowest it's been since 1917, just before we entered World War I. And it will take debt service down to 2 cents on the dollar. And then our successors, the people that are up here running the show 15 years from now, they can do whatever they want with that 11 cents. They can give it back to you in a tax cut. They can invest it in education. They can invest it in whatever else we need. They can make sure we keep modernizing our military. They can do whatever is the right thing then. But I know it is the right thing to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers and to stabilize these programs and to get this debt down. There's something else I'd like to say. A lot of you compete in international markets. On the way in today--just today--Roger and I were talking about the difficulty of--and Secretary Daley--we were talking about the importance of trying to keep these Asian markets open, with all this financial turmoil over there and their not having enough money. You know, Secretary Rubin and I, we worked very hard to keep the financial crisis in Asia from spreading to Latin America. Thirty percent of our growth has come from exports. Now, we don't know what's going to happen beyond our borders. But I know this: No matter what happens, we'll be better off. Interest rates will be lower; there will be more money to spend on new plant and equipment; there will be more money to invest in American economic growth if we pay down this debt and we keep your interest rates low. Then if the world takes off again--and we're working for it--we'll do even better. And if there are problems in the world, we won't get hurt nearly as badly as we otherwise would have been. So I implore you, if we want more and more stories like the ones we celebrate today, I hope you will support our efforts to save a substantial portion of this surplus until we have secured Social Security, stabilized Medicare, and guaranteed low interest rates for another 15 years. It's important for America. The second thing I'd like to say is that just as you make investments in your employees, we must make more investments. America has had for many years a budget deficit and an investment deficit. While we have cut the deficit, we've almost doubled our investment in education and training. But 88 percent of the companies--listen to this--88 percent of the companies in manufacturing today are having trouble finding qualified applicants to fill at least one kind of job. One in five companies report that they cannot expand because they have not been able to have workers with the right mix of skills to support the expansion. That's why I'm so grateful, as I said before, for the example that you were setting in your workplace and why our administration, the Vice President and Secretary Daley, Secretary Riley, and others, have worked so hard to set up a system of lifetime learning, to open the doors of college to all with tax credits and scholarships and much lower cost student loans, and many, many other things. In this budget of mine, we are proposing a big new investment in our worker training system so we can support training and re-employment for every person who loses a job in America. We want to help millions more whose first language is not English, learn it. We want to help many more people come back and finish their GED and then go on to college. And you are setting a good example. We also, in this budget, have tried to provide the private sector with the necessary incentives to reach the biggest group of new markets that we haven't fully tapped, and those are the markets for employees and consumers in the inner city and in rural areas that still haven't been part of our recovery. Now, this is very important. In America today, in the urban and rural neighborhoods where unemployment is high and growth is low, there is a consumer market of $85 billion in those areas, bigger than the consumer market of Mexico, which is our second-largest purchaser of American products and trading partner. So what I have asked the Congress to do is to pass laws providing tax credits for people who invest in these designated areas, and also setting up a model, sort of like our Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which many of you in this room have used before, to guarantee a portion of investments in an inner city, so that, for example--suppose that in a big urban census area that had a 15-percent unemployment rate, you were willing to go in and set up a plant with 300 people and train them and do all that, and the initial investment was $300 million. If you took full advantage of this proposal of ours, you could have 2 of that $300 million guaranteed in the ``American Private Investment Corporation.'' The other $100 million, you'd get a 25 percent tax credit for the investment. So if we put together $300 million of investment in an underdeveloped area, you would actually have only $75 million at risk. That's a pretty good deal. And we can--if we can't take free enterprise into these urban and rural areas that have had no recovery now, with our lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957, with a high growth rate, and with safer investment opportunities at home than many of those abroad we pursued-- if we can't fix America now, when will we ever be able to do this? So again, I hope you will support this. The last thing I'd like to ask you to do is to support the continued expansion of trade. In the State of the Union Address, I said, ``We've got to build a new consensus on trade in America and beyond our borders.'' We've got to be able to convince the American people and people in other countries that trade benefits ordinary citizens, that it doesn't have to tear the environment up. It certainly doesn't have to depress labor standards. I know and many of you in this room know that 30 full percent of all this growth that we all celebrate all the time came because we've expanded trade. And so I ask for your support to make sure that the financial crisis we saw in 1998 doesn't become a trade crisis in 1999 because we don't do everything we can to continue to expand trade and support open borders. [Applause] Just last week the Vice President announced our plan to call for a big reduction in agricultural tariffs, which now average 40 percent. We're trying to restore the traditional trade authority that Presidents since Gerald Ford have had, to create new opportunity for American companies. We are committed to doing this, and I thank you for your applause. But you know as well as I do that a lot of Americans--it's very interesting--when we had this trade debate last year, I found that there was an unusual alliance in the Congress between some of the most conservative Republicans and some of the most liberal Democrats, both of whom thought those of us who were sort of stuck in the middle believing that we could actually create a new world economic system that would benefit ordinary people were wrong, and they thought we had to withdraw. As I said, I'm working hard within my own party to build a consensus on this, and at the same time I'm trying to reach out to Republicans to build a consensus with them. But I do not believe we can continue to grow the American economy and raise American incomes and reach into America's distressed neighborhoods unless we continue, also, to reach out to the rest of the world. Furthermore, I believe we can minimize the likelihood that we will ever have to send our men and women in uniform into a big conflict if we have economic and other cooperation with countries that show that there are other ways to solve your difficulties than taking up arms and robbing children of their future. So that's what I think we ought to do. I'm glad we're doing well. I am grateful for having had the chance to serve. I am very mindful of the fact that a lot of the credit for America's success goes to companies and the people who work for them, like those we honor today. But I am absolutely certain that this is not the time to sort of sit back on our laurels and say, ``Isn't this nice. We've waited for 40 years for a time like this. I think I'll take a vacation.'' This is a time to take this prosperity we have and this confidence we have and expand our efforts. We can meet the long-term challenges of the 21st century. We can alleviate the looming specter that the baby boom might bankrupt our children and our grandchildren to pay for our retirement. We can guarantee a secure retirement, a compact within the generations, and we can pay down the national debt and guarantee low interest rates and a stable situation and more capital to invest in the private sector for 15 years. We can improve our education and training systems. We can invest in our inner cities. We can expand trade. That is an economic agenda that will set a framework within which more companies who follow your lead will find the same kind of success that you have. And remember what I said when I started. America wouldn't have nearly the problems we have today if everybody was as happy on the job as you are. Thank you, and good luck.”