Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton Job Retraining Program Wright State University Dayton, OH October 2, 1992 This morning I started the day in Toledo. Toledo was the place that Bush skipped on the train trip and Dayton is the place that Quayle canceled a couple of days ago. And I thought I could make up for both of them with two good stops today. This morning we focused on the problems of America. This morning I want to focus on the promise of America and how what I have seen here and the work that is done here and what you have already heard here by the people who have talked from both the private sector and from this university represent a clear direction that our country ought to take. We know well enough what the problems are. The economy has been stuck in stagnation. The census reports that two-thirds of our people are working harder today for lower wages than they were making 10 years ago. We know that manufacturing is down and unemployment claims are up, that poverty is up and construction is down, that income is down and bankruptcies are up. There have literally been more than twice as many bankruptcies as there have been new jobs in the last four years. And all the job growth under this administration has come in the government employment it so deplores. There has been an actual reduction of 35,000 jobs in the private sector in the private sector in the United States of America since January of 1989. In the last two years alone, average family income has declined by $1,600. Now, we all know what the problem is. I would argue that it has been aggravated not only by global economic competition but by a limited theory that has been embraced by this administration and the former one which is loosely known as trickle down economics. In which the idea is that if you keep taxes low enough on the wealthiest individuals that they will invest their money and the benefits will trickle down to the rest of us. No other nation, I might add--no other advanced nation-- follows this theory. And many of the countries of the world are governed by conservatives--people who would call themselves Republicans if they were in the United States. But they don't believe that this works. Now, the question for us today is, if it isn't working what is the alternative? But the alternative--it used to be, if you go back and look at elections in times past, the American people would basically vote between those who wanted to redistribute wealth and those who followed trickle-down. The redistribute wealth crowd were roughly called tax-and-spend crowd. The idea is that you tax people with money and spend it, and give it to other people and somehow that produces a better society. That doesn't work either if what you need is economic growth. So we don't need tax-and-spend and we don't need trickle-down. We don't need either one. What works for a nation is what you have seen here. Investment, education, new technology, productivity, partnerships between business and labor, government and education. It works here at this school; it will work for the nation if we do it. And that is what I offer the American people in this election. Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, which is hardly an arm of the Democratic Party, there was a huge article on our administration in Arkansas which said that we had enjoyed solid job growth while we had kept taxing and spending steady in a state with the second lowest overall tax burden in the country. When we raised money, we raised it on things that would generate growth and income. We spent all the money we raised on education, on training, on new technology, on new transportation systems, on investments in growth that would increase wealth. That is what we have to do as a country. And I would argue to you that this school is a good model for that. In my state we led the country in the last year in private sector job growth. But it didn't happen overnight. We worked for years to carefully build the kind of partnerships you've heard described here today. We can now send, for example, adult educators into any workplace in my state with a 100 or more employees and teach everybody in the workplace to read and give them all access to a high school education so then they can participate in the kind of programs that are offered here. There are all kinds of things like this that need to be done. Today I don't know if they talked about this, but today, before I came in here, I saw the cryogenic process that is being developed here, where this school is using liquid nitrogen to replace the oils that are normally used to cool machines as they cut through metal. Any of you who have ever been involved in manufacturing know that there's a lot of machines cutting through metal in America every day and a lot more all across the world, and they wear out in a hurry and they slow down quickly if you don't do something to control the heat. The problem is that these oils that are used are difficult, they're not biodegradable, they're hard to dispose of, they cost a lot to meet the environmental standards. This school is now wanting to use liquid nitrogen in a way that will increase the efficiency and productivity of the machines and will pose no threat to the environment because all you have to do is return the nitrogen to its gaseous state and it's part of the air again. This is the kind of thing here that you can be very proud of. Now--so the question is if we don't want trickle-down and we don't want tax-and-spend, and we'd like things like this to happen, how can more of it happen, so we have people working and incomes growing. And I want to emphasize there are two great economic problems in this country. It is not just unemployment, it is incomes. Most people are working but they're working harder for less than they were making 10 years ago. So we have to have an income strategy and an employment strategy, jobs and income. What should we do? First of all we have to realize that no job is created without investment; somebody has to spend money. Jobs cannot be created without investment. Therefore we need to change from trickle-down which is across the board tax cuts for upper income people, ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share, but say if you want to avoid taxation invest it in new plants, new equipment, new jobs, new training programs, new technologies, new housing projects, put the American people to work and you can make money in the tax system. When John Kennedy was elected president this economy was stagnant, the United States Congress, at his request, adopted a generous investment tax credit that said to companies all over the country buy the most modern equipment, modernize your plants, upgrade your investments and we'll let you write them off quicker. It spawned a long and explosive period of growth. All over American, people in manufacturing and small business people say to me, give me an investment tax credit and I will speed up my investment and that is what we need to do here. We need to recognize that 85 percent of all the new jobs in this country are now created in units of under 50, and we need to have new incentives for people to get into small businesses or to expand them. So we should say if you invest in a small business and you hold the investment for five years we'll only tax you at half the normal rate. Give people incentives to put their money into the small business generating of America. The second thing we need to do is have a national commitment to partnerships like this school represents all across this country. For a relatively small amount of money we could teach every American worker with a job to read in the next five years, give every American in the work force a chance to get a GED and then give everyone access to at least a two-year education and training program. That is the sort of thing that this country needs. If you look at where we are not competitive with other nations around the world, it is in the skill level of the bottom 50 to 60 percent of our workforce. We send more people to college than anybody on earth today. But there are all kinds of people who get out of high school and don't go on to any further training, and they are in real trouble. The average high school graduate starting work today is starting at a wage that, adjusted for inflation, is more than 20 percent lower than it was 15 years ago. What does that mean? That means every person who gets out of high school should have at least access to two years of further training at an apprenticeship program, at a community college, in the workforce, or in some other way, and we need a system that promotes that in this country. We don't have a person to waste. Everybody needs to be in one of those programs. Second thing I want to say about education is that we should open the doors of college education to all Americans and make it possible for people to stay. This school has such a practical involvement with the emerging economy that it may not be so here, but the drop-out rate from college nationally is more than twice the high school drop-out rate, and one big reason is how much money it costs to stay. So the student loan program is plainly inadequate to the task. What we should do, I think, is set up a national trust fund, out of which any American can borrow the money to go to college and then pay it back in one of two ways: either as a small percentage of their income after they go to work, at tax time so you can't beat the bill, but your payment would be tied to your income, not just how much you borrowed, but your income; or, even better, a person, before or after college, could work for two years rebuilding America in kind of a domestic Peace Corps. If you think about it, what if everybody paid off their college loan by working as a police officer or a teacher, in a health clinic program, working with the elderly or people with disabilities, working in a housing program, rehabilitating all these closed down houses to house the homeless? We could solve, in a very non-bureaucratic, grassroots ways, a lot of our people problems, and educate a whole generation of Americans. It would raise the income level of America dramatically to improve our skill levels that much, and we could solve a lot of our problems while doing it. I think it would be the best money we ever spent, and the national government should take the initiative in getting that done. Next thing I want to talk about very briefly is what you have seen today. We need to do a better job of investing our resources in research and development to come up with new ideas to solve problems, and then taking those ideas and turning them into jobs here in America. The new movement to preserve our environment while promoting economic growth makes this possible. One of the big ideas you all have to decide whether you believe in or not in this election, and you'll see it in the debates in the next 30 days, is whether you think in order to help the environment you've got to hurt the economy, and vice versa. I believe that promoting environmental protection will be one of the great economic opportunities of the next 10 years. It can create unbelievable numbers of jobs. You already heard the description that I gave of the cryogenic process here but there are many other examples. If you, for example, change the energy policy of this country and you use more renewable energy or you convert cars to natural gas, you're creating jobs and economic opportunity for Americans. If you find ways to develop high speed rail or light rail systems in this country to use less energy, you're creating jobs for more Americans. If you find ways to recycle solid waste and to find more intelligent ways to deal with toxic waste and hazardous waste, you'll be creating jobs for Americans. And if we do it real well, we can do it for other countries and create even more jobs for Americans. But all this requires a very disciplined commitment of the nation's resources. I have argued that every dollar by which the defense budget is cut should be reinvested in building an economy for the 21st century in America. Every dollar should be reinvested. We should do much more research and development into technologies that may have dual uses--for defense and for commercial purposes. We should authorize all of our federal laboratories to do much more in the area of joint ventures with the private sector, just the way you work here with the private sector. We are going to have to integrate the money we spend in research and development and taking ideas into the job place with the government and the private sector much more completely than we ever have before. And we're going to have to help smaller operations to do well. Keep in mind the average fast-growing job market is a small one. I have advocated that we should establish 170 manufacturing extension centers in this country to help small manufacturers learn how to do high productivity work, have access to the latest scientific and technological discoveries and do the things that only big companies can do today. And you heard Mr. Hall, your congressman, talk about micro-enterprise development. We have got to bring free enterprise to poor people in inner cities and rural areas in this country. The free enterprise system has to be brought there. There is not enough government money to solve these problems. It's a question of making enterprise work. Well, all these things require a lot of effort. And they don't sound like trickle down and they don't sound like tax and spend, and they require a government that is more entrepreneurial, more active, but less bureaucratic, one that is committed to investment, to education, to cooperation, and to making America able to compete and win again. In the last couple of weeks, I issued a technology paper, a small business paper, and a manufacturing paper, and I tried to get these ideas out across the country. And the most rewarding thing to me of all is that this election has begun to take on a tone that has very little to do with the stale, boring debates of past elections, the fights of sort of rock throwing between Republicans and Democrats and labeling of liberal and conservative. These plans have garnered the support in the last two weeks of an astonishing number of Republicans, independents, former Perot supporters. In northern California, in Silicon Valley, the home of our fastest growing computer companies, a couple of weeks ago, 21 high tech executives of some of the biggest companies in this country, including Apple Computer and Hewlett-Packard, two-thirds of them Republicans, endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket for president because it's good for the economy. In Chicago, 400 business executives from all across the country, more than one-third of them Republican, endorsed our ticket. People like John Kareni, who's the president of Newcore Steel, a company that has two plants in my state, is quoted in U.S. News and World Report about the economic strategies we have pursued, said he had never voted for a Democrat for president in his life, but he wanted his country to work again. He wasn't interested in party labels, he was interested in jobs and income and growth and opportunity, and that's what this election ought to be about. Let me close with this thought for you. There are some things a president can't do. There are some things only people can do. This is still fundamentally a free society in which the government plays a supporting role and should be involved in empowering people to take control of their own lives. So we need a lot of more places like this university all across America to make these ideas come alive. We can create the opportunity at the national level, but people have to seize it at the grass roots level. No president can promise to make things the way they used to be. No one can ever recreate the economy that existed in Ohio 15 or 20 years ago. We are going to live in a world in which the average 18-year-old will change work eight times in a lifetime. The great challenge for us at this time is to make change our friend instead of our enemy -- to analyze those areas where we are not competitive and so we're not able to allow every man and woman and every boy and girl to live up to the fullest of their God-given potential. And when you look, you know what those areas are: We don't educate our rank-and-file folks as well as our high-wage competitors; we have too many people who are left out and left behind, principally in inner cities and isolated rural areas; we don't invest anything like as much of our income in research and development, into new technologies, and then sharing those new technologies and turning them into jobs in our country; we spend way too much money on health care bureaucracy and regulation and insurance profits and too little on making people healthy again, and that is costing business a lot of money. And we are under-investing. So we know where we are out of competition. We know where we're not meeting the standard of a very vigorous world marketplace. We also know our people are working harder than they were 20 years ago, we know we're as smart as anybody else, and we know we have incredible creative strengths, as evidenced by a lot of the projects that are going on right here at Wright State University. There is no reason to despair if we have the courage to change. That's what I want you to know. The next 20 years can be the best years this country ever had if we have the courage to change. So let me say this. I want to leave you with this challenge. I want to win the election on November 3rd--of course I do. But more than that, I got into this race not to win an election, but to change the country, and that cannot happen unless I do my part as president, Tony Hall does his part as a member of Congress, but you do your part to seize the future that is plainly there before us. Thank you very much and God bless you all.