LABOR: Speech - Washington, DC - 9/3/92 REMARKS BY GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON AFL-CIO WASHINGTON, D.C. SEPTEMBER 3, 1992 Thank you very much, President Kirkland and all the men and women of the AFL-CIO for your endorsement of me and of Senator Gore in our common efforts to change this country. I'm glad to be here today, grateful for your support, eager to embrace the next nine weeks of battle. I'd like to begin by just saying one personal word, and that is a special thanks to all of you along the way in this campaign who have taken some personal time to meet with me, to discuss issues with me, to frankly air disagreements with me in ways that were I think helpful to both of us and to our common cause. I want to say a special word of thanks to one of my top staffers who's here today, my campaign manager, David Wilhelm, who worked very hard all during the primary process and is known to many of you. I had a--my first meeting with Lane Kirkland was fascinating. It's not the easiest person in the world to have an argument with and even lose with dignity, much less win. But it was sort of an example of a lot of what has happened over the last year to me as I have been crossing this country, listening to people, trying to come to terms with the realities of their lives. I wish that every one of you could have been on at least one leg of the bus trip that--or the trips that our families have been taking across this country, seeing the people whose lives have been broken, and the people who still live with hope. Seeing the people who have lost their jobs, or just the people who have lost their incomes. Seeing the people who have lost their health care or who have lost their health. Seeing the number of people who desperately want to believe that this country can work again for them and for everyone, that we really can come together again, and who are determined to make it happen. School children on a stage coach in Salado, Texas, a woman in Columbus, Ohio, who used to be for Ross Perot who was a divorced woman with seven children and a $50,000 a year job who had to quit her job and go on welfare because one of her children was terribly ill, and in this country the only way she could get any health care for that child. So she lost the power of supporting that child and the other six. I could tell you story after story after story of Americans who are trying to pick up the pieces of this nation's neglect. And I say to you that while I know we have not always agreed and we'll never always agree on everything, I believe we share a common commitment to the working men and women and their children and their parents, the opportunity to dignity, to equality,and most of all to the forgotten middle class. We're going to make Bush and Quayle and their crowd remember those folks on November the 3rd. I believe there's something wrong with the people who do the work, raise their kids, pay their taxes, play by the rules and embody those family values, our adversaries spent so much time talking about in Houston, keep getting the shaft. That's the subject they didn't want to deal with. By the way, could yo believe that Republican convention? Then spent the first two days running against Hillary. I was convinced Mr. Bush was going to walk out there on Thursday night and announce he was going to file for first lady. And that Pat Buchanan would be his running mate. And Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell would be his secretaries of culture and appropriate behavior. Mr. Bush says this election should be about trust, and I believe that's right. I trust the American people and he doesn't. The election should be about who is to be trusted, to get our economy moving again, to build a high-wage, high growth high opportunity future, instead of letting this nation drift as it now is into a hard work, low wage, low growth future. The election should be about who can be trusted to talk straight, to take responsibility, to make tough decisions. Yes, the election is about trust, but for George Bush to say the election is about trust is about like me saying the election should be about making short speeches. Yesterday--let's be real and serious for a moment--yesterday the Commerce Department reported that Americans' real incomes declined by 2 percent last year alone, the first decline in real incomes in ten years and the worst decline in real incomes in over 30 years. And just this morning we're told that household income is down $1,000 this year over last year, median family is down 2.4 percent, and 2.1 million Americans have fallen into poverty. You can see that if you're in my business, at the state level. Ten percent of this country's on food stamps now. The Medicaid rolls of states all across the country are going up by 12 to 15 percent a year, as more and more people are living in poverty and without health care. Four years ago Mr. Bush asked us to trust him when he said ``read my lips, no new taxes''. Then he signed the second biggest tax increase in history and it turned out what he really meant was no new taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent. Four years ago he asked us to trust him when he said 15 million new jobs. Now he's more than 14 million short. We've lost over a million manufacturing jobs in the last three and a half years alone. Less than one million jobs have been created and only 100,000 of them have been in the private sector. The other 800,000 plus were in the government sector that he claims to hate so much. Our country now has only 16 percent of its workforce in manufacturing, as compared with 28 percent for the Japanese and 32 percent for the Germans. Four years ago we were asked to trust Mr. Bush when he promised that the next century will be ``an American century''. But over the past 11 and a half years, while the Reagan-Bush- Quayle team have been in charge of America's economic policy, we have gone from first in the world in wages to 13th, and the latest census figures plainly show that over two-thirds of the American people are working harder for less money than they were making ten years ago. Four years ago Mr. Bush asked us to trust him when he promised us, and I quote, ``prosperity with a purpose''. But four years later we have no prosperity and this administration has no purpose except to win the election in November. You know that people are smart enough to see politics as usual, and have been burned enough to know we've got to go beyond the gridlock which has characterized policy in Washington, and which is only broken by the threat of the voters voting. So in the next few minutes, let's try to get beyond what might happen in the next nine weeks, and imagine what might happen in the next four years if Mr. Bush were to be reelected, to see what we can trust him to do. If you can trust the promises he made in Houston, he's going to cut another $294 billion in taxes over the next five years, over and above the deficit we already have. That means that that's just the beginning. If you trust him, he's going to cut taxes across the board with the wealthy getting most of that, and cut the capital gains tax. So he's promised $294 billion of spending cuts before Houston, over the next five years. And now he wants to cut another $252 billion, just for the tax cut at two percent; even if it's just a two percent tax cut. Then if only one-half of the taxpayers accept his little check-off to put ten percent of their taxes on the debt that's already been accumulated, that's another $139 billion. Then he's going to increase the personal exemption, which will cost another $182 billion over five years. Then he's going to pour at least $100 billion more into a health care industry whose costs he has steadfastly refused to control. Then he's going to pour $30 billion of public funds into private schools if he prevails on that. Then his short-term across-the-board capital gains cut will save the average millionaire $100,000 but won't guarantee investments for new jobs. It makes no distinction between vacation homes and new businesses being started. That costs $31 billion. Well, to paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who was an old-fashioned Republican, and would have been appalled by this, you take $252 billion here and $182 billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. When you put a price tag on all his promises, he's promising somehow to give us a trillion dollars worth of stuff over the next five years that he will make up for in budget cuts. You know who he's going to send the bill to, don't you? Same people who have been taking a beating for the last dozen years. The middle class who are working harder for less. The working poor. And the poor. You can see that future a little bit in a document he issued that most Americans never heard of called the mid-session review. A couple of months ago he spelled out the cuts that he would make now--that's before we get to the across-the-board tax cut, before we get to the capital gains cut, just the cuts that he recommends now. He doesn't want most Americans to see this mid-session review, or to take it seriously, but he waved it in the air proudly when he gave a speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council on August 6th. And he said, and I quote: Here is the mid-session review, and it tells exactly and specifically how to get the deficit down. And he pointed out it did have $294 billion worth of cuts over five years. He wanted to make older Americans, with incomes under $20,000, many much lower than that, pay another $400 a year for Medicare, or charge them $2,000 a year. That will save $120 billion by sending the bill to our parents and grandparents, so we can, in part, finance a capital gains tax on short-term gains by the wealthiest Americans. He wants to save $4 billion from federal student aid, and lose tens of billions of dollars of untapped human potential on all those who either won't go or won't stay in college. Perhaps cruelest of all, he's recommended taking 1.2 million disabled veterans off the disability rolls altogether, to save $10 billion by sending the bill to the people who have sacrificed for our nation. The mid-session review tells, in short, how he's going to get all this money. For $294 billion. And it gives you a sneak preview of what he'll have to pay when that bill goes to a trillion dollars to pay for all of his other tax cuts. When he looks at the federal budget, there are some things he's promised to give away, and some things he's promised not to touch. He says, no matter what, he won't raise taxes on the wealthiest one percent, even though their taxes have been lowered while your taxes have been raised. He's got his defense budget in place for the next five years, and he says--he says--he won't fool with Social Security. But listen to this: if he covers the tax cuts with budget cuts, as he says, here's what you get. If he gets rid of all veterans benefits, taxes all Medicare benefits as ordinary income, eliminates all the farm price supports while our competitors are refusing to do it--and that's one area where we're still competitive and making money in international markets--freezes discretionary spending, which means no more investment in education, the environment and economic growth; freezes cost-of-living adjustments on every program except Social Security; he'd still have another $344 billion to cut, if he gets rid of all of that. And then he'll have no choice: he'll be forced to cut, even to gut, Medicare and Social Security. Because if you don't raise taxes on the wealthy, and you don't cut defense any more, and you can't get the economy growing again, then you just have to get all this out of spending cuts. Now, no wonder he doesn't want to say how he's going to do this. One more incredible promise: you've got to take the tax cut, and I'll tell you about the budget cuts later. If we trust Mr. Bush, as he asked, it means we're going to have to do one of two things. We're going to explode this deficit, which is already too big and imperilling our future; or we're going to devastate America's middle class even further, increase the number of poor, and imperil our children's future. Now, when this speech was given, the stock market got it, they didn't take it seriously, and the stock market dropped the next day. Those are his constituents, and they're going to be, a lot of them, for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, because they know we got a plan for getting this country going again. When he gave this speech, our allies got it. The dollar dropped dramatically against the German mark the next day, because they knew we weren't--he wasn't--serious. They got it. And I think the American people are going to get it. When George Bush first ran for president 12 years ago, he called his kind of promise, voodoo economics. Twelve years later, he's become the high priest of voodoo economics -- sticking pins in the middle class. My fellow Americans, we can do better than that. We can do better than that. I've offered this country a plan that will really move us forward, a plan that challenges all of us to change; it gives us a chance to move beyond trickle-down economics on the one hand, between their borrow-and-spend policies on the one hand and tax and spend on the other, to an invest and grow policy, one that asks the wealthy to pay their fair share, but still keeps those tax rates well below what they were in 1980; one that disciplines federal government spending in consumption, but increases what we invest in job generation, in research and development, in education and training, in building an economy for the 21st century; one that builds cooperation between business and labor and government and education. You look at these other high-wage high-growth countries: they've got everybody on the same side. They don't spend all their time fighting over how a shrinking pie will be divided it, because they're working too hard to grow the economic pie so everybody can have more money. I would love to see the Clinton-Gore administration produce more millionaires than Bush and Reagan did, but I've got this crazy notion that it ought to happen the old fashion way, by putting the rest of America to work, and letting the rest of America earn for the work that they do. That's why when we say, yes, we should raise taxes on the upper two percent of Americans because they're paying $76 billion less than they would had the 1980 tax rates stayed in effect, we still want to raise--keep the tax rates at a modest level, and use that money to pay for an investment tax credit for industry for new plant and equipment--the same kind of tax credit that John Kennedy put in, the same kind of tax credit that our competitors have. In America, we tell manufacturers you get more tax breaks by shutting your plant down and moving it overseas, than you do for modernizing equipment here; we ought to reverse that here in this country. That's why we say, instead of getting a capital gains break, if you hold a stock certificate for a year, you ought to get a break if you start a new business and invest in it for five years. Eighty-five percent of the new jobs in this country are being created in units of under 50. Let's give people an incentive to risk, but to risk to put other people to work. The American people will support that. That's the American way. That's why we say, we ought to put more incentives into research, and development; into low-income housing; into those things that will rebuild our country and put the American people to work. We cannot have another four years where 80 percent of the jobs we create are in the public sector. Even those of you who are public sector employees know that you have to be supported by a vital private sector. This is a free enterprise economy. Whoever thought we'd have a four-year period where 80 percent of the net new jobs in the country came from the public sector? In a Republican administration that vows to hate government? You know what those public sector people are doing? You know what they're doing? They're running jails, because we are first in the world in the percentage of people we've got behind bars. Because we're undereducated and underemployed; because we haven't done enough to reduce crime. You know what else they're doing? They're in health and human services programs where the government is taking care of exploding numbers of poor people, because we don't have a national health care plan that controls health care costs and provides health care to everybody. So the policies of this country are shrinking the private sector and expanding the public sector, because we are driving Americans down when we ought to be lifting them up. And it is a terrible mistake. I want to have a vibrant public sector. I want to use the government to promote growth in the private sector. That's why I want to spend $20 billion a year for the next four years in defense cuts and revenue increases on the wealthiest Americans, to build a transportation and a communication system, and an environmental cleanup system, that will put people back to work who lost their jobs in the defense business, who can be part of a high-wage high-growth infrastructure economy for the 21st century. That's why I want a policy that expands trade on terms that are fair to the United States. If you look at the last quarter of anemic growth, you will see that almost all of our low growth was because of a dramatic drop in exports. This administration says they really believe in that. You had a dramatic drop in exports. I believe, as you all know, that if we had the right kind of trade agreement with Mexico, it would be good with us, because if we had no agreement, we'd still see jobs go on a fast-track down there seeking relief from high health care costs, thinking the only way they can make money is to drive wages down. I have seen manufacturing countries export more per capita than we do and still build a high wage-base at home, and we can do that. We ought to pass Super 301 trade authority. We ought to tell our trading partners we're going to open markets. And we ought to have the right kind of trade agreements with all of our partners. But with Europe becoming more integrated, and maybe more closed; with Asia becoming more integrated and maybe more closed; we have to have some markets. And that's why I hope we can get the right kind of agreement with Mexico. The president accused me of waffling on the issue because I wouldn't trust him with an agreement I haven't read. He taught me four years ago I can't read his lips. I'm going to have to read the paper. I want to see the paper. But we have got to be winners in the world. We've got to promote local growth. Because we had an irresponsible policy, other nations have followed slow-growth policies, and the whole world has been winding down, because we have refused to lead in putting people back to work, and investing in our future, and in responsibly reducing the American deficit while increasing investment in critical areas to our economic growth. This whole election is going to be about whether we can really create an environment with a growing economy, with growing opportunity. We saw that we value families; all Americans do. But our administration does not act like it does. Most families have good values; what they want to do is have a chance to live by them. They know that there is nothing wrong with the American dream; the American dream hasn't failed. The policies of this administration have, and it's time to change them. It is time to chanin which we have to convince them that we are prepared to go beyond the policies of the past; beyond trickle-down; beyond borrow-and-spend, not back to tax-and-spend, but forward to invest-and-grow; that we are all prepared to do our part, all prepared to seize the future. I have been terribly impressed with some of the things that I have seen, on some of the work sites that many of you represenposal you can be proud of, instead of this ridiculous list of promises, and these election-year conversions that don't even start a year ahead of time, but only start two months ahead of time. Let's go out there for the next nine weeks and ask America to seize on something real; to have real hope over the fears the Republicans are putting out; and to choose the future over a proven road of failure. Let's go win this election. Thank you very much.