George H.W. Bush said "It doesn't make sense it will get the deficit down by giving Government more money. He uses the word ``to invest.'' The Government doesn't invest. Private business does. Give them more money to spend. At a time when every organization is decentralizing power, why turn back to a central bureaucracy in Washington? Yet, saying this isn't enough. We've got real problems here in America. You see them every single day in your communities. You hire high school graduates who can't figure out how to run the cash register. You strive to give your people health insurance, but the cost just keeps going through the roof. Those of you who run restaurants in the cities see the problems of crime and drugs and poverty right up close, firsthand. So it's not enough to criticize the old way. Government must find a new way to help. I'm a conservative, and to me being a conservative means to renew, to reinvigorate what has always made America great, and that is the power of the individual. During this campaign many have sought to portray the choice between, quote, ``activist Government'' and a trickle-down approach to Government. But the real choice is not between activism and passivity. The real choice is between a liberal bureaucratic Government that seeks to impose solutions on everybody else and a conservative activist Government that gives individuals, businesses, and families the means to make their own choices through competition and economic opportunity. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. Start with education. Governor Clinton worked with me when we set for the first time in history six national education goals, first time in history. I give him credit for that effort; he was very active in it, deserves credit. But as a candidate for President, Governor Clinton has adopted the agenda of the status quo. He wants to pour more money into the same failed education system, a system where funds are controlled tightly by central bureaucracies, where powerful unions, the teachers union, the NEA, block real reform, and where we spend as much per pupil as any nation but Switzerland. But we don't get an adequate return on our investment. But tinkering with the system won't do it. It is my view it simply will not get the job done. So I want to put power in the hands of the teachers themselves, not the union. So I want to use competition to improve our schools. Our ``GI bill'' for kids provides scholarships for elementary and high school students so that every parent, rich and poor, can choose the best schools for their kids, public, private, and religious. Somebody asked me, won't that make the public schools worse? Where it's been tried, in Milwaukee and other places, it doesn't. The public schools that aren't chosen do what you have to do: compete and do better. And it isn't a violation of church and state. It's like the GI bill; the money goes to the families. It does not violate church and state. It's a good idea. It's a new idea. And we ought to try it. Now, you see the same differences in health care. Governor Clinton has offered three plans in this campaign. One said to all of you, either offer care on your own or pay a new payroll tax, at least 7 percent. Now, many experts said it was a backdoor way to get Government directly involved in running health care. Now Governor Clinton wants to control the price of health are by setting up a big board in Washington, DC, to set prices. And I say Government cannot lower prices by fiat; only competition can. Government doesn't need to tell you what doctor to see. And we don't need to inflict small business with any more mandates from Washington, DC. But we've got to do something about health care. So here's my alternative, and I'm convinced with the new Congress we can get it through: Offer tax incentives for small businesses so that you can afford to buy health care on your own. Let small businesses pool the coverage so you can get the same price breaks as AT&T or IBM. For people who are too poor to pay taxes, we will give vouchers so that they can choose the care they want. Freedom, putting people over bureaucracy, these are the principles that we offer. My opponent trusts Government to choose the best place for child care. I fought for and won a new law that gives low income parents the freedom to use Federal money for child care wherever they want to, whether a government center or a church. And when it comes to deciding where your child spends the day, rich or poor, it doesn't matter, Government should not limit your options. Parents ought to have the freedom to do what they think is right. My opponent thinks Government can pick the industries of the future with your money. I talk about cutting capital gains and investment tax allowances, giving first-time homebuyers a tax credit, because you know what to do best with your money, better than any bureaucrat. Governor Clinton says that it's okay that we have Members of Congress who serve decade after decade in Washington. I trust America's judgment, so I want to limit the terms of Members of Congress and give Government back to the people. Now, when you look at the election in these terms, you see a clear choice. Governor Clinton dreams of expanding the American Government. I want to work to expand the American dream. I offer an agenda for helping people by giving you and your families the power to make your own choices, shape your own destiny. We call it the Agenda for American Renewal. It's a comprehensive, integrated approach to fixing our schools, reforming our health care, right-sizing Government, and creating here in America the world's first $10 trillion economy. My agenda includes 13 priorities for the first year of my second term, but 3 dwarf all others. First, America needs jobs, not in a while, not tomorrow but now. This week new numbers came out indicating that our economy grew at 2.7 percent last quarter, the sixth straight quarter of growth. It's a long way from the depression that Governor Clinton talks about. But look, we must do better. We don't need higher taxes so that Government can put more people to work. We need incentives to grow, to cut Government redtape and make more credit available so that you can put more people to work. While we are strengthening small business, we will open new foreign markets for our products by winning congressional approval of our free trade treaty with Canada and Mexico. The bottom line is this: More trade creates more high paying jobs for all Americans. They make the charge that free trade agreements will ship our jobs overseas. My question is: If that's the case, lower labor rates is the determining factor, why isn't Haiti the industrial capital of the world? Decisions are made on other things. We will create more jobs with opening up export markets. Our third priority is health care. I already mentioned some of my ideas, but the need for action is urgent. We simply cannot control the deficit, we simply cannot make our companies even more competitive until we make health care more affordable and more accessible for you and all your workers. Those are the three. As we're working on these priorities, we'll be working on others. One special priority is to reform our crazy legal system. It's gotten out of hand. I'm sure many of you fear the customer who will try to rip off the system by sticking you with a frivolous lawsuit. America now spends up to $200 billion every year on direct payments to lawyers. People say, ``So what?'' As the Wall Street Journal said this week, ``If we could devote just some of that money to productive activity, we could do far more for our economy than all the Government investment that Governor Clinton promises.'' For our economy, for productivity, for our national sanity, we must sue each other less and care for each other more. It is a crying shame when your neighbors can't coach Little League because of a frivolous lawsuit, or someone sees a victim along the side of the highway and doesn't dare stop because he or she remembers a case of where a lawyer came on and said, ``Oh, you shouldn't have moved that person, and we're going to sue you.'' We can't do that. We are a caring country. We've got to put caps on these outrageous liability claims. We also, obviously, we must reduce this deficit, but not by raising taxes but by getting ahold of spending, cutting spending. We need a balanced budget amendment. We need a line-item veto so the President can cross out frivolous expenditures. This one isn't easy, but we need to cap the growth of the mandatory programs. Set Social Security aside, except Social Security, but get ahold of the growth of those mandatory programs that make up two-thirds of the President's budget. And we need a check-off on your tax return so each taxpayer can earmark up to 10 percent of his taxes to be used for nothing but getting the debt off our children's shoulders. We have simply got to restore hope to our inner cities. And so I will work with the new Congress to get tougher crime laws, to battle more on this drug problem--we're making some progress there but we've got to do better--to reform the welfare system and to attract and keep business. All using this principle of putting faith and power not in bureaucracies but instead in real people. And perhaps most important, we will reform and right-size Government, subject it to the same discipline as every other large organization in America. Now, that then is our agenda for America's renewal, and it builds on the foundation we've laid for the last 4 years. But it's what I've been talking about on the campaign trail and what I will fight for in my second term. Obviously you must be thinking, well, it sounds great, but what will be different? After all, today there is a gridlock in Congress, gridlock in Washington. If people want arguments and shouting, they can turn on their TV talk shows, but they expect and deserve better from their elected officials. I understand this, but I really believe we have an historic, unique opportunity before us. After next week there may be up to as many as 150 new Members of Congress from both parties, all who have heard the same rumble of discontent across our land. So I plan to use the time between November through January to meet with all the new Members of Congress and to shape a legislative package in a way that will guarantee swift passage. The time to move for a new President, with no politics over the horizon, and a reelected President, is early in the first term. Politics aside, sit down with Democrats and Republicans and get the people's business done fast. We will set deadlines for decisions, and we'll meet them. We'll put aside partisan politics, as I tried to do in the very first term--and we did get some very good things done early in the first term--and we'll abandon this politics as usual. When we confronted Saddam Hussein we saw that when America turns its attention to a problem, we can do literally anything. We can mobilize for war. We can mobilize for hurricanes. Let's mobilize for our economy and get this country moving again. If we need to, we'll go beyond Washington. Already our America 2000 education reform effort involves parents and teachers and business leaders in over 2,000 communities, and this will be a model for other efforts. America's desire for positive change requires building new coalitions and taking advantage of grassroots power, and we will. That then is my action plan. But what about Governor Clinton? In June, he promised to present his 100-day plan even before the election. That's 4 days away. No plan, no plan has been sighted yet, and the reason is simple. You're more apt to see a UFO than you are his plan. [Laughter] The reason is simple: The numbers, his numbers, just don't add up. He's promised too much. His new congressional friends want to raise the ante even higher, and the result will be more spending, a bigger deficit, continued gridlock. My agenda offers an alternative. We can break the gridlock without breaking the bank. A vote for our philosophy is a vote for change that really matters; a vote for change that builds on our strengths, not ac- centuates our weaknesses; a vote for a phi- losophy that is right for your businesses, right for your families, right for America. Let me wrap up now with a word about character. Listen to the words of Horace Greeley. He said, ``Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing; only character endures.'' I think that as you look back in history, hopefully now, I think that's especially true in the Presidency. Character matters, not just because of the plans you make but the crisis you never foresee. A couple of weeks ago my Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, gave a speech that didn't get a lot of attention. But he made an objective case that the world is still very uncertain. He said, and I quote, ``The next 4 years may be far more challenging, far more difficult, the problems far more complex internationally than the problems we've just come through the past 4 years.'' We don't know where the next crisis will occur. But we do know this: When the next crisis happens, the entire world will look to the American President. They will look to his experience, and they will count on his character, on his word of honor. What is character? How do you define it? I'm not sure. But a friend of mine says it's acting alone the way you would act with a million people watching. As President you're never more alone than at times of a crisis. While nobody may be watching in the Oval Office, millions here and abroad will feel the impact of your judgment. It is easy, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, to portray the decision to go to war as an easy one, but it was not. Think back. It was not uniformly popular. The Democratic Congress had spent much of the fall parading experts who said we'd get into another Vietnam. They said a war would kill any hope for peace in the Middle East. What really got to me was the charge that I didn't care about the numbers of body bags that were coming back from the sands of Kuwait. The vote in the Congress was not overwhelming. Many said, let's give sanctions more time. But I made the tough decision, a decision to go to war, because I knew it was right, not because I knew it was popular. I remember well the cold, rainy February day at Camp David when the ground war to liberate Kuwait began, and how fervently I prayed that our plans would work and our young men and women would return home victorious and alive. This, then, is an awesome responsibility, to ask our young men and women to knock early on death's dark door--is a responsibility I believe I have fulfilled with honor and duty and, above all, integrity. That is your call on November 3d. Then the polls and the pundits don't matter any more. God bless them, it's all up to the people. When you enter that voting booth, please ask yourself three commonsense questions: Who has the right vision for America's future? Who can lead us through this global transition? And which candidate has the character? Who would you trust with your kids? Who would you trust in a crisis? Ideas, action, character. I have tried very hard to demonstrate that I have all three. So I ask for your support on November 3d. Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you very much. Note: The President spoke at 10:40 a.m. at the Opryland Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to John M. Cranor III, president and chief executive officer, Kentucky Fried Chicken; Kyle T. Craig, president, KFC-USA; John R. Neal, president, JRN, Inc.; Charles W. Middleton, president, KFC of Elizabethton; and Steven D. Provost, Assistant to the President and Chief Speech Writer." @ PoliticalQuotes.com

On the recordOctober 30, 1992

It doesn't make sense it will get the deficit down by giving Government more money. He uses the word ``to invest.'' The Government doesn't invest. Private business does. Give them more money to spend. At a time when every organization is decentralizing power, why turn back to a central bureaucracy in Washington? Yet, saying this isn't enough. We've got real problems here in America. You see them every single day in your communities. You hire high school graduates who can't figure out how to run the cash register. You strive to give your people health insurance, but the cost just keeps going through the roof. Those of you who run restaurants in the cities see the problems of crime and drugs and poverty right up close, firsthand. So it's not enough to criticize the old way. Government must find a new way to help. I'm a conservative, and to me being a conservative means to renew, to reinvigorate what has always made America great, and that is the power of the individual. During this campaign many have sought to portray the choice between, quote, ``activist Government'' and a trickle-down approach to Government. But the real choice is not between activism and passivity. The real choice is between a liberal bureaucratic Government that seeks to impose solutions on everybody else and a conservative activist Government that gives individuals, businesses, and families the means to make their own choices through competition and economic opportunity. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. Start with education. Governor Clinton worked with me when we set for the first time in history six national education goals, first time in history. I give him credit for that effort; he was very active in it, deserves credit. But as a candidate for President, Governor Clinton has adopted the agenda of the status quo. He wants to pour more money into the same failed education system, a system where funds are controlled tightly by central bureaucracies, where powerful unions, the teachers union, the NEA, block real reform, and where we spend as much per pupil as any nation but Switzerland. But we don't get an adequate return on our investment. But tinkering with the system won't do it. It is my view it simply will not get the job done. So I want to put power in the hands of the teachers themselves, not the union. So I want to use competition to improve our schools. Our ``GI bill'' for kids provides scholarships for elementary and high school students so that every parent, rich and poor, can choose the best schools for their kids, public, private, and religious. Somebody asked me, won't that make the public schools worse? Where it's been tried, in Milwaukee and other places, it doesn't. The public schools that aren't chosen do what you have to do: compete and do better. And it isn't a violation of church and state. It's like the GI bill; the money goes to the families. It does not violate church and state. It's a good idea. It's a new idea. And we ought to try it. Now, you see the same differences in health care. Governor Clinton has offered three plans in this campaign. One said to all of you, either offer care on your own or pay a new payroll tax, at least 7 percent. Now, many experts said it was a backdoor way to get Government directly involved in running health care. Now Governor Clinton wants to control the price of health are by setting up a big board in Washington, DC, to set prices. And I say Government cannot lower prices by fiat; only competition can. Government doesn't need to tell you what doctor to see. And we don't need to inflict small business with any more mandates from Washington, DC. But we've got to do something about health care. So here's my alternative, and I'm convinced with the new Congress we can get it through: Offer tax incentives for small businesses so that you can afford to buy health care on your own. Let small businesses pool the coverage so you can get the same price breaks as AT&T or IBM. For people who are too poor to pay taxes, we will give vouchers so that they can choose the care they want. Freedom, putting people over bureaucracy, these are the principles that we offer. My opponent trusts Government to choose the best place for child care. I fought for and won a new law that gives low income parents the freedom to use Federal money for child care wherever they want to, whether a government center or a church. And when it comes to deciding where your child spends the day, rich or poor, it doesn't matter, Government should not limit your options. Parents ought to have the freedom to do what they think is right. My opponent thinks Government can pick the industries of the future with your money. I talk about cutting capital gains and investment tax allowances, giving first-time homebuyers a tax credit, because you know what to do best with your money, better than any bureaucrat. Governor Clinton says that it's okay that we have Members of Congress who serve decade after decade in Washington. I trust America's judgment, so I want to limit the terms of Members of Congress and give Government back to the people. Now, when you look at the election in these terms, you see a clear choice. Governor Clinton dreams of expanding the American Government. I want to work to expand the American dream. I offer an agenda for helping people by giving you and your families the power to make your own choices, shape your own destiny. We call it the Agenda for American Renewal. It's a comprehensive, integrated approach to fixing our schools, reforming our health care, right-sizing Government, and creating here in America the world's first $10 trillion economy. My agenda includes 13 priorities for the first year of my second term, but 3 dwarf all others. First, America needs jobs, not in a while, not tomorrow but now. This week new numbers came out indicating that our economy grew at 2.7 percent last quarter, the sixth straight quarter of growth. It's a long way from the depression that Governor Clinton talks about. But look, we must do better. We don't need higher taxes so that Government can put more people to work. We need incentives to grow, to cut Government redtape and make more credit available so that you can put more people to work. While we are strengthening small business, we will open new foreign markets for our products by winning congressional approval of our free trade treaty with Canada and Mexico. The bottom line is this: More trade creates more high paying jobs for all Americans. They make the charge that free trade agreements will ship our jobs overseas. My question is: If that's the case, lower labor rates is the determining factor, why isn't Haiti the industrial capital of the world? Decisions are made on other things. We will create more jobs with opening up export markets. Our third priority is health care. I already mentioned some of my ideas, but the need for action is urgent. We simply cannot control the deficit, we simply cannot make our companies even more competitive until we make health care more affordable and more accessible for you and all your workers. Those are the three. As we're working on these priorities, we'll be working on others. One special priority is to reform our crazy legal system. It's gotten out of hand. I'm sure many of you fear the customer who will try to rip off the system by sticking you with a frivolous lawsuit. America now spends up to $200 billion every year on direct payments to lawyers. People say, ``So what?'' As the Wall Street Journal said this week, ``If we could devote just some of that money to productive activity, we could do far more for our economy than all the Government investment that Governor Clinton promises.'' For our economy, for productivity, for our national sanity, we must sue each other less and care for each other more. It is a crying shame when your neighbors can't coach Little League because of a frivolous lawsuit, or someone sees a victim along the side of the highway and doesn't dare stop because he or she remembers a case of where a lawyer came on and said, ``Oh, you shouldn't have moved that person, and we're going to sue you.'' We can't do that. We are a caring country. We've got to put caps on these outrageous liability claims. We also, obviously, we must reduce this deficit, but not by raising taxes but by getting ahold of spending, cutting spending. We need a balanced budget amendment. We need a line-item veto so the President can cross out frivolous expenditures. This one isn't easy, but we need to cap the growth of the mandatory programs. Set Social Security aside, except Social Security, but get ahold of the growth of those mandatory programs that make up two-thirds of the President's budget. And we need a check-off on your tax return so each taxpayer can earmark up to 10 percent of his taxes to be used for nothing but getting the debt off our children's shoulders. We have simply got to restore hope to our inner cities. And so I will work with the new Congress to get tougher crime laws, to battle more on this drug problem--we're making some progress there but we've got to do better--to reform the welfare system and to attract and keep business. All using this principle of putting faith and power not in bureaucracies but instead in real people. And perhaps most important, we will reform and right-size Government, subject it to the same discipline as every other large organization in America. Now, that then is our agenda for America's renewal, and it builds on the foundation we've laid for the last 4 years. But it's what I've been talking about on the campaign trail and what I will fight for in my second term. Obviously you must be thinking, well, it sounds great, but what will be different? After all, today there is a gridlock in Congress, gridlock in Washington. If people want arguments and shouting, they can turn on their TV talk shows, but they expect and deserve better from their elected officials. I understand this, but I really believe we have an historic, unique opportunity before us. After next week there may be up to as many as 150 new Members of Congress from both parties, all who have heard the same rumble of discontent across our land. So I plan to use the time between November through January to meet with all the new Members of Congress and to shape a legislative package in a way that will guarantee swift passage. The time to move for a new President, with no politics over the horizon, and a reelected President, is early in the first term. Politics aside, sit down with Democrats and Republicans and get the people's business done fast. We will set deadlines for decisions, and we'll meet them. We'll put aside partisan politics, as I tried to do in the very first term--and we did get some very good things done early in the first term--and we'll abandon this politics as usual. When we confronted Saddam Hussein we saw that when America turns its attention to a problem, we can do literally anything. We can mobilize for war. We can mobilize for hurricanes. Let's mobilize for our economy and get this country moving again. If we need to, we'll go beyond Washington. Already our America 2000 education reform effort involves parents and teachers and business leaders in over 2,000 communities, and this will be a model for other efforts. America's desire for positive change requires building new coalitions and taking advantage of grassroots power, and we will. That then is my action plan. But what about Governor Clinton? In June, he promised to present his 100-day plan even before the election. That's 4 days away. No plan, no plan has been sighted yet, and the reason is simple. You're more apt to see a UFO than you are his plan. [Laughter] The reason is simple: The numbers, his numbers, just don't add up. He's promised too much. His new congressional friends want to raise the ante even higher, and the result will be more spending, a bigger deficit, continued gridlock. My agenda offers an alternative. We can break the gridlock without breaking the bank. A vote for our philosophy is a vote for change that really matters; a vote for change that builds on our strengths, not ac- centuates our weaknesses; a vote for a phi- losophy that is right for your businesses, right for your families, right for America. Let me wrap up now with a word about character. Listen to the words of Horace Greeley. He said, ``Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing; only character endures.'' I think that as you look back in history, hopefully now, I think that's especially true in the Presidency. Character matters, not just because of the plans you make but the crisis you never foresee. A couple of weeks ago my Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, gave a speech that didn't get a lot of attention. But he made an objective case that the world is still very uncertain. He said, and I quote, ``The next 4 years may be far more challenging, far more difficult, the problems far more complex internationally than the problems we've just come through the past 4 years.'' We don't know where the next crisis will occur. But we do know this: When the next crisis happens, the entire world will look to the American President. They will look to his experience, and they will count on his character, on his word of honor. What is character? How do you define it? I'm not sure. But a friend of mine says it's acting alone the way you would act with a million people watching. As President you're never more alone than at times of a crisis. While nobody may be watching in the Oval Office, millions here and abroad will feel the impact of your judgment. It is easy, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, to portray the decision to go to war as an easy one, but it was not. Think back. It was not uniformly popular. The Democratic Congress had spent much of the fall parading experts who said we'd get into another Vietnam. They said a war would kill any hope for peace in the Middle East. What really got to me was the charge that I didn't care about the numbers of body bags that were coming back from the sands of Kuwait. The vote in the Congress was not overwhelming. Many said, let's give sanctions more time. But I made the tough decision, a decision to go to war, because I knew it was right, not because I knew it was popular. I remember well the cold, rainy February day at Camp David when the ground war to liberate Kuwait began, and how fervently I prayed that our plans would work and our young men and women would return home victorious and alive. This, then, is an awesome responsibility, to ask our young men and women to knock early on death's dark door--is a responsibility I believe I have fulfilled with honor and duty and, above all, integrity. That is your call on November 3d. Then the polls and the pundits don't matter any more. God bless them, it's all up to the people. When you enter that voting booth, please ask yourself three commonsense questions: Who has the right vision for America's future? Who can lead us through this global transition? And which candidate has the character? Who would you trust with your kids? Who would you trust in a crisis? Ideas, action, character. I have tried very hard to demonstrate that I have all three. So I ask for your support on November 3d. Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you very much. Note: The President spoke at 10:40 a.m. at the Opryland Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to John M. Cranor III, president and chief executive officer, Kentucky Fried Chicken; Kyle T. Craig, president, KFC-USA; John R. Neal, president, JRN, Inc.; Charles W. Middleton, president, KFC of Elizabethton; and Steven D. Provost, Assistant to the President and Chief Speech Writer.

Said by

George H.W. Bush

Republican · Texas

Source

govinfo.gov