ECONOMICS: Speech - Flint, MI - 10/2/92 Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton Rochester-West Plant Flint, MI October 2, 1992 I'm glad to be back here. You know, I was here in March, and I learned that half the people here are from Arkansas. And that, literally, if I went down to Burton I'd be the only guy there, I wouldn't have an accent, everybody talk just like me. I am delighted to be back here. I thank Senator Riegle for his introduction, and I'm glad to be back in Flint with Mayor Stanley and my good friend, Governor Blanchard, and the other state officials who are up here, and all of you. I have just come from Toledo, Ohio where Mr. Bush didn't stop on his train, then I went to Dayton where Mr. Quayle didn't go after he said he would, and now I'm in Flint where Mr. Bush didn't go. Maybe I can make up to all three towns today. Ladies and gentlemen, last night Al Gore and I were in Wisconsin, and we appeared before about 25,000 people at Madison, Wisconsin, in front of the state capitol. And I heard him say something I think I ought to repeat to you. He said, you know, this is a crazy time in America. Unemployment is up, and manufacturing is down. Poverty is up, and construction is down. Income is down and bankruptcies are up. Everything that ought to be up is down. Everything that ought to be down is up. This country's upside down, but we're going to put it right side up on November the 3rd. You know, when you hear these guys talk about four more years, it sounds more like a threat than a promise. Look at that record. The record is in now. We got the last economic statistics today. In four years, in the United States as a whole, there has been a decline of 35,000 private sector jobs. No new jobs in the nation as a whole in the private sector. Only real increases in the government that George Bush professes to hate. If you look at what's happened in the last two years, a 16 hundred dollar decline in average family income. Most people are working harder today than they were ten years ago for lower wages. Even the people that have jobs are being hurt. 100,000 Americans a month losing their health insurance. Why did this happen? I'll tell you why. Because of trickle down economics. They're in the grip of a failed economic theory. They really believe if you keep taxes low on the richest Americans, have no economic strategy whatever, all the benefits will trickle down. Well, they got their wish. The top one percent of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. For ten years, the wages of our top executives have gone up by four times as much as workers' wages, and three times as much as profits. But it didn't trickle down. We got no job growth, no income growth, a health care system that's coming apart at the seams, too many people can't afford to go to college or to study any more. This country is going in the wrong direction, and it's time to take a new course. That's what this whole election is all about. And if you look at what Bush says, even when he tries to do something, he betrays the real values of this administration. He went to Japan on a trade mission. Remember that? Which ended with the prime minister of Japan saying he felt sympathy for the United States. No wonder we get played for a sucker. We've got a four billion dollar trade surplus in auto parts with everybody except Japan. When you put Japan in, we've got a $9 billion trade deficit, even though we are competitive in auto parts. So what did Mr. Bush do? When they sent multi-purpose vehicles in here from Japan, and our own government said--our own government said, well, these things have to be under the tariff for light trucks, the Treasury Department under Mr. Bush's orders overruled our own government and forced the lower tariff to reward the Japanese for shafting the American auto parts industry. That's the kind of trade policy this administration has followed. And now, did you see what happened last week? It has now finally been revealed by one of the television networks that this administration has been spending American tax dollars to finance shutting plants down in America and moving them to Central America. It is literally true that George Bush has taken your tax dollars and financed more private sector job growth in Central America than in middle America, than in the United States of America. The very idea of it--304 people lost their jobs in Tennessee because the government actually helped to finance a low interest loan for people that shut the plant down and move it to Central America which they would not give that same plant owner to modernize their plant and equipment in Tennessee. And the government paid for an advertisement to encourage people to come down there for 57 cents an hour labor. Your tax dollars paid for that. And to make it worse, your government spent more money training workers in Central America than they spent to train workers who lost their jobs because of foreign competition. And, to make it worse, a hired employee of the United States government, whom you paid for, was photographed on live television--or he was photographed live, I don't know if he ought to be--he was photographed talking to someone who said, I'm from Miami, Florida and I want to know if I should shut my plant down. Are these workers down here reliable? And an employee of your government that you paid for said, oh, yes, they're reliable down here. As a matter of fact, they're more reliable than your workers in Miami. And when the guy said, well, what about unions. He said we don't worry about that down here. We've got them black listed. You can just fire them when you want. And we've got a black list. Now, your government is paying for this. Folks, I believe in trade. Michigan sells a lot of stuff around the world. America has to sell around the world, and we have to buy. I believe in that. But I'll swear I think we ought to spend our tax money to keep jobs here in export products and services, not spend our tax money to export jobs. Ask George Bush if he ever gets off the train in Flint why he spent American taxpayers' dollars to throw them out of work. I mean, this is amazing, and it shows you the callous insensitivity of this administration. There are farmers listening to us tonight through the media. Michigan's got a lot of farmers. This administration had a program that the Congress provided for them so that we could sell grain to other countries. Finally the Cold War is over. Russia wants to buy grain from us. Bush sits on the sale for eight months, and Europe gets the business, because they don't believe in trade if it's us selling to somebody else. They don't believe the government ought to help anybody except to finance the shutting down of jobs here and moving them overseas. Let me tell you something. I believe in trade, but I believe we ought to have a policy which uses our powers to invest in American jobs, American goods, American products, and an American future, and that's what I'm going to do. Let me give you an example. Bush wants another across the board tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, a tax cut that doesn't make any distinction between buying a Maserati and starting a plant. I want to ask the wealthiest people in our country, those with incomes above $200,000, to pay a little more in taxes, because their taxes were lowered while yours were raised under Bush and Quayle. But then I want to say to them, hey, look, I want to make millionaires, too. I just want us to make millionaires the old fashioned way, by putting the American people to work. So, here, if you want to make money, you want to avoid tax rates, invest in new plants, new equipment, small businesses, new technologies, housing for Americans, put our people to work, and then we will give you a tax break, but not until. That's what we ought to do. I'll tell you something else. I believe that we ought to use the power of America's scientists and engineers, all these people that won the Cold War for us to figure out a way to win the economic wars of the futures. So I say, let's take every dollar by which the defense budget is reduced and reinvest that money in building the American economy here at home. New transportation, communications, environmental clean up system. Let's put all those people to work and make real jobs and opportunities for Americans. I'm telling you, folks, the issue in this campaign is jobs, and incomes. And here is this administration with no record, no vision and no future. The other day one of their own administration officials is quoted in Time magazine as saying of their own plan, doesn't matter much what we tell the American people. We don't plan to follow through on it anyway. Well, let me tell you something, you can take my plan to the bank. It's going to work. We're going to invest in your, and build this economy, and open America and win again. You know, let me say something else. The issue is jobs and incomes. It is also about whether we are going to develop the ability of our people to move forward. It's about whether we have a whole strategy to create a high wage, high growth, high opportunity society. Let me give you another example. Not only do we not give incentives to people to modernize plant and equipment here; our tax code will subsidize you more if you shut your plant down and move it overseas. If somebody wants to invest overseas, that's their business. But why should we subsidize it? No more incentives for moving overseas. More incentives for building the American economy. I'll give you another example. We're still the only advanced country in the world where the national government does not work with the private sector to control health care costs and provide basic health care to all Americans. So what happens? We're spending 30 percent more of our income than anybody else on health care. We'll never know how many manufacturing jobs that cost us, how many small businesses that cost us. No telling how much misery in the lives of people who can't change jobs because they've had somebody in their family's been sick and they can't move because they've got a pre-existing condition. Unless you vote for Bill Clinton you will not get a national health system to provide basic health care to all and put a lid on these costs to bring them within inflation. And we have got to do that. Finally, let me say the people in this town and the people in this state have proved they are willing to change and to be productive. But we have to have a national system that will give everybody the opportunity to be continuously retrained and re-educated for a lifetime. This is the only advanced country that doesn't guarantee every high school graduate at least two years of further apprenticeship training so they can be competitive in the global economy and get good jobs. This country does not have a system to retain all of its workers continuously so some get it and some don't. This country does not have a system to try to provide people who do lose their jobs with the opportunity to get trained in areas where there will be jobs, and then direct investment there so there will be money there to create the jobs once they got the training. We don't do that. But our competitors do, and that's why so many countries now are growing faster than we are. And this country ought to open the doors of college education to all Americans. We ought to make it possible for everybody to go. And we can fund these things, folks. If we bring health costs in line with inflation, we ask the wealthiest Americans, people with incomes over 200,000 to pay their fair share, if we take the defense cuts and reinvest them here, if we are disciplined we can fund these things, and move this country forward. And if you're willing to change, and you're willing to do what it takes to be great, productive Americans, we can open this economy again and give our kids a brighter future. But I'll tell you something. You're going to hear the awfulest bunch of squalling from the other side in the next 33 days you ever heard. You know, Bush comes to Michigan, tries to tell you I'm going to shut the automobile business down. He tells me that I'm--I couldn't do any better job of that than he has. If I tried, there's no way I could cost as many jobs as he has. Why does he say that? Because he can't run on his record and he can't run on his vision, so he's got to badmouth mine. Let me tell you something. You look at my record. All of you who've got Arkansas roots, call down there. You know where Arkansas ranks in private sector job growth this year? Number one. You know we have grown manufacturing jobs at ten times the national average, because we had a strategy to work together, business and labor, government and education. We thought we could do what we had to do to grow the economy and protect the environment and move forward together in a sensible, fair way. And I believe we can do that in the United States. And I'm tired of all this fear mongering. And now the Bush campaign has got this incredible ad on. I don't know if you have seen it, which shows a factory worker and says I'm going to charge him some more, and shows a scientist and says I'm going to charge her some more in taxes. And when they were asked, they virtually admitted that they just made it up. It isn't true. It isn't true. Why would they run a false ad like that, why would he president of the United States take your tax dollars to run a bogus ad? Well, he takes your tax dollars to move plants overseas. He thinks you can do anything with tax dollars except try to put you back to work. I'm going to tell you the truth. Move this country forward and lift us up if you will help me. Will you spend the next four and a half weeks to change this country? To end trickle down economics, to put the American people first, to give our kids a future. I need your help. I need Michigan's support. I'm telling you, we are better than this. We can do better than this. You do not deserve what has happened to the United States of America in the last four year, and we can do better. If you will dedicate the next four and a half weeks, I'll get up every day, I'll work as hard as I can to make you proud to pull this country together and to move forward, we can win again folks. But we've got to seize our own future. And it all begins on November 3rd. Don't let them take it away. Give it back to the American people. Thank you and God bless you.