Bill Clinton: “Thank you so much. I want to thank the principal of this school for calling the assembly to order and Mayor Wagner for…”

“Thank you so much. I want to thank the principal of this school for calling the assembly to order and Mayor Wagner for welcoming me here and Senator Barbara Baldizar, of whom I am so proud, who served with such distinction in our campaign in 1992, and Congressman Dick Swett for that fine introduction and for the work he does in your behalf in Washington. There are many others here today, legislators, other officials. school officials, and personal friends. I'm glad to see all of you here. I announced my candidacy for President in New Hampshire, here in Nashua, in October of 1991. I told you I'd keep coming back. I know I'm a week late for your traditional town meeting, but I'm not 4 years late. I did show up. I have so many vivid memories of this community. I remember I was so nervous the first day I came here in October of '91. I said, ``Nobody knows who I am, nobody knows where I'm from, nobody knows anything.'' And we were on our way to a restaurant where some people had probably been dragged kicking and screaming to come and meet me for the first time. And on the way, there was one other cafe, and I just decided I would go in and shake hands there and start, just cold. And so my wife and I walked in, and there was one guy sitting at the counter drinking a cup of coffee. And he turned around and he said, ``I know who you are. I'm a construction worker from Leachville, Arkansas, and you're the best Governor we ever had.'' So I said to myself, these people are so shrewd up here, they will never believe I did not place this man on this stool--[laughter]--and that I never saw him before or since. I remember going to the Moe Arel Center and talking to the people who live there about their health care concerns. I remember in the hotel where I stayed last night, an early morning meeting I had with Senator Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia, before we had a big health care forum where people came from all over New Hampshire and all over New England. I remember so many things that I have done in this community, and I'm very grateful to be back. I've just come from Detroit, where I was meeting with finance and other economic officials from the G-7 nations, the world's largest industrial nations, Canada and France, Great Britain and Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, talking about the problems that every wealthy nation in the world is now having, even in times of economic growth, in creating new jobs and raising incomes; talking about how we are in an entirely different global economy that is changing very rapidly, opening up new opportunities but also imposing new obstacles to the fulfillment of human potential everywhere, and what we can do together to deal with the problems we face. I learned a lot about those problems right here in New Hampshire. I think it is no secret to anybody who knows me the depth of affection and commitment I developed to the people of this State, even those who didn't vote for me, because of the experiences I had here in 1991 and 1992, because of the laboratory you provided for all of us who sought the Presidency to learn about the continuing problems and the enduring promise of this great country. Ever since I started this campaign here, and in every day I have been President, I have been focused on what it will take for us to do what we need to do to move into the 21st century as the greatest country on Earth, giving our children a better future and getting our people to live up to their potential. I always believed that the purpose of public life was to get people together and to get things done and to lift human dignity and human potential. When I first took office, my first line of business was to get our economic house in order. We had seen in only 12 years a quadrupling of our national debt. We had seen America with such a huge deficit that all of our trading partners every year for 10 years got together in these great G-7 summits and passed delicate resolutions pointing their finger at the United States, saying, ``If you don't bring your Government deficit down, you're going to wreck the world economy.'' And so we went to work on that. Last year, Congress passed an economic plan that will reduce the deficit by $500 billion. If they pass the budget I presented this year, which passed the House in record time, we will have 3 years of reduction in the Federal Government's deficit in a row for the first time since Harry Truman was the President of the United States. Now, that has led to lower interest rates, low inflation, increased investments, increased activity in any number of sectors of the economy, and a real economic comeback for the country in 13 months, 2.1 million new jobs, 90 percent of them in the private sector. In the 1980's, a far higher percentage of new jobs coming into our economy were in State and local government, not in the private sector. So I believe we have made a good beginning. The unemployment rate in New Hampshire is about a point and a half lower than it was when I was elected President, and I'm proud of that. The economic plan also, as people will find out on April 15th, contains some very important changes in our Nation's tax laws. Yes, income tax rates were raised for the top 1.2 percent of income earners, and all the money was dedicated to deficit reduction. But almost 17 percent of our taxpayers will get an income tax cut. Almost all of them will be working people with children on modest incomes. It is a very important thing to do to encourage people to work, to make it possible for them to be successful workers and successful parents, and to discourage people from going on to welfare. Here in New Hampshire, it will cover 41,000 taxpayers. In addition to that, the small businesses will find--and this is terribly important to you--this new economic plan contains several incentives to try to help deal with some of the problems that I learned about here in New Hampshire. Most of your job loss has been in larger companies; most of your job gains have been in smaller companies. This new program makes 90 percent of the small businesses in America eligible for a tax cut on April 15th by increasing the expensing provision for small business by 70 percent and provides dramatic new incentives for people to invest in new and small businesses, with a long-term capital gains cut of 50 percent for people who invest in those businesses for 5 years or longer. In addition to that, we are doing a lot to try to change the regulatory environment in which our financial institutions make loans. In the end, that is the ultimate test of our success. It was here in Nashua that I first heard horror story after horror story after horror story about people having their loans foreclosed when they had never missed a payment. I think it's fair to say that our success record there has been substantial but uneven and that practices are still different around the country. But we are moving deliberately to try to do that so that we can free up capital to invest in America, to grow jobs in the private sector. A lot of your firms here in New Hampshire and throughout New England are high-tech firms that depend upon markets abroad as well as at home. We've lifted export controls on $37 billion worth of high-tech equipment and opened new markets through a generation's worth of trade agreements concluded last year, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico, a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade throughout the world. And for our young people, we've reformed--as I said I would in town meeting after town meeting after town meeting here in this State--we've reformed the college loan program so that now more loans will be available at lower interest rates and young people will be able to pay them back not just based on how much they borrow but as a percentage of their income after they go to work, so that it will always be manageable, the repayment of the loans, and no one will ever be discouraged from going to college. Last year, the Congress passed the national service program that I talked about in all the town meetings here. This year, 20,000 young Americans will be able to serve their communities, solving hard, concrete, human problems at the grassroots level, and earn credit against their college education. Year after next, 100,000 young Americans will be able to do that, and I am proud of that. The first law that I signed into being that was really the product of my campaign was the family and medical leave law, a law that had been twice vetoed before I became President. Just yesterday in Detroit, I met a woman in a plant I visited who came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, ``I have already taken advantage of the family leave law. It matters; people should not have to lose their job to take care of their children or their parents.'' So we are changing the country together as a result of the campaign which began in these dialogs in New Hampshire. This year, the Congress has a full schedule. First, we are trying to enact a new crime bill that is both tough and smart, building on the passage of the Brady bill last year, to put another 100,000 police officers on the streets not only in big cities but in small towns, to take assault weapons out of the hands of criminals, to try to make sure that we punish serious offenders more severely but that we give first-time youthful offenders another chance and something to say yes to in life as well as something to say no to, and that we provide drug treatment on demand to deal with the fact that an enormous percentage of these crimes are the direct result of the drug problem. We are trying to pass, in addition to the crime bill, a dramatic set of improvements in education laws, a school-to-work bill that will provide at least another year first and then 2 years of training for people who don't want to go to 4-year colleges but need further training, people like those whom I met with at the graduation at New Hampshire Technical College last May. This is a dramatic thing. The unemployment rate for people who have 2 years of post-high-school education in America today is 5.7 percent. The unemployment rate for high school graduates is about 7.5 percent. The unemployment rate for high school dropouts is over 11 percent. It makes a huge difference. We are attempting to reform the entire unemployment system to change it to a reemployment system, to consolidate the programs and put unemployed people to work in new training programs as soon as possible. We're trying to give our school systems incentives to reach world-class standards with grassroots reforms and give them the support they need to do it. All these things are on the plate this year. We're going to try to pass a comprehensive welfare reform bill that will end the welfare system as we know it and give people a chance to move to independence. Finally, we are determined that this will be the year when finally America will join the ranks of other advanced nations to provide comprehensive health care to all of our citizens. [Applause] Thank you. There is one of your citizens here in New Hampshire to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude, and I want to acknowledge him today, and that's Dr. Everett Koop, who was, as all of you know, Surgeon General under President Reagan and who lives here in New Hampshire and who works here and has been of enormous help to the First Lady in the work they have done conducting forums throughout the country, trying to get doctors and nurses and medical centers involved in developing this health care plan and making sure it will work. He has played a major role in that, and I am very grateful to him for that. You may have seen in the press reports, my wife was out in Colorado yesterday and had huge crowds of students at Boulder with big signs saying, ``Give 'em health, Hillary.'' Make no mistake about it, some of the people who are giving me hell in Washington are doing it so I can't give you health. But I'm going to try to give you health and take whatever it is they want to give me in return for making sure you get what it is you're entitled to. Now, I'm anxious to answer your questions. But let me just make a point or two about this. New Hampshire has a lot of strengths in terms of the health care you already have that many other States don't. And so you may say, ``Well, what's in this for us?'' You have, for example-- only about 5 or 10 percent of your people don't have access, physical access, to good medical care. Most States as rural as New Hampshire have a far higher percentage of people who don't even have access. You have one of the finest immunization programs in the country. You've already done a lot of what the rest of the country needs to do in community- based mental health services. There are a lot of things that you can be very proud of. You have a higher percentage of your people who are insured and therefore a lower percentage of your people who are uninsured. So you say, ``Well, what do we get out of this?'' First, there will be no more uncompensated care, so the people who are providing health care will have some reimbursement because everybody will have insurance. Second, the people who are covered by Medicare but aren't poor enough to be on Medicaid, the kind of people I met at the Moe Arel Center, will, for the first time, have access to prescription medicine. And we'll phase in support for long-term care over and and above and in addition to nursing home, so that there will be some support for in-home care or community-based care. This is very important. The fastest growing group of Americans are people over 80. And more and more people over 80 are quite vigorous and quite able to live good and full lives but may need some support. Over the long run, if you look at the population trends in this country, where we are going with our age groups, over the long run we will save money if we provide a broader range of long-term care support and enable people to be as independent and as strong as they can for as long as possible. You will benefit from that. The other thing I think is terribly important--I had a wrenching encounter at the hotel this morning, just before I left to come over here, where a woman came up to me with tears in her eyes, just crying, and she said, ``My husband just lost his job, and we have preexisting medical conditions in our family, and I do not know how we are going to get insurance.'' Even if you have insurance today, the only people who know they can't lose their insurance are people who work for employers that aren't going out of business and aren't ever going to lay anybody off. Everybody else is at some risk of losing their insurance, until you get old enough to get on the Medicare program. And that is a serious problem, because we have--I don't know how many people I've met in this State--we've got millions of Americans who have someone in their family who's been sick before and have a preexisting condition and therefore either can't change jobs for fear of losing their health insurance, can't get insurance now because they've fallen through the cracks, or pay higher rates. So even here in New Hampshire, I assure you, there is something to be gained from having a system in which everyone always has some basic health insurance. We are going to work very hard to make sure we don't mess up what you're doing right here and give the States the flexibility they need. But we still deal with the fact that we have not solved this problem as a country. And I can tell you that we will never get the deficit erased, we will never balance the budget, and we will not restore long-term health to this economy or security to our people until we face this problem. So these are the things that are going to gather the attention of the country this year. And they will command the attention of the people of New Hampshire. I hope you will continue to debate and discuss them. And let me say again, as I open the floor to questions, this is the way I think public life ought to be conducted. I love the town hall meetings I had in New Hampshire in 1991 and 1992. And I never fail to be inspired by the fact that they were so different from the tenor and tone of political debate and discussion in the Nation's Capital--my guess is they still are--not because there were no debates, no arguments, no disagreements but because they were about big things. They were about you, your future, and your children, and that is, after all, what we ought to be about. Thank you very much. Is this on? Questions? How are we going to do this? First of all, let's identify the microphone holders. Who's got the mikes? Stand up; raise your hands. All right, I'll tell you what. I think we will do-- I'll just start over here, and we'll just go around the room and then turn around and go back again. Why don't you pick someone? Community Service Programs”