URBAN PROBLEMS: Speech - Houston, TX - 6/22/92 "PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST" ADDRESS TO THE CONFERENCE OF MAYORS GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON HOUSTON, TEXAS JUNE 22, 1992 Thank you very much, Mayor Riley, Mayor Flynn, Mayor James, and Mayor Lanier, we're glad to be in your city. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the person who came up here with me, my wife Hillary, who is at least half of our campaign. I'm a little jealous today. I was preceded on the podium by Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley, two great athletes. I was always a slightly overweight band boy, and I've resented them all my life. People still remember their heroic exploits. When I went on "The Arsenio Hall Show" and played my saxophone, I got no respect. All he said was he was glad to see a democrat blow something besides an election. They did make me think of a good old athletic story, though. Kemp, the football player, and Bradley, the basketball player, might remember the great baseball slogan that, when I was a boy, they said that Willie Mays' glove is a place where triples go to die. I think that Jack Kemp's office and Bill Bradley's office are places where good ideas go to die today, because we have no leadership to rebuild America, including urban America. I want to talk to you today about, not only how our country is losing its way, we know that, but about what we can do about it. In the USA Today this morning on the front page of the second section, there's a little article that says, "USA Slides in Economic Rankings." This is an international poll of business executives who, last year, said that we were only the second best economic power in the world, compared to Japan. This year, that group of executives ranks Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark ahead of the United States in our economic vitality. Because their work forces are better educated and better trained, because they do a better job of taking ideas and turning them into jobs in their country, because they invest more in their infrastructure in building an economy for the future than do we. Our country has been in the grip of the false idea. And it has kept government from working for most people. It is an idea which has been written into our law, and driven into our lives, not just by one party, but by both parties which permitted it to happen in the last decade. The idea was advanced by our presidents but has been ratified by our Congress, that if you just cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on our corporations at high incomes and got out of the way, they would invest, take care of all the rest, and we would grow. Well, it was a bad idea. And it hasn't worked that way. Seventy percent of the economic growth for a dozen years has gone to the top one per cent of our people. The contribution of our wealthiest corporations to the tax coffers has gone down. Middle class taxes have gone up, and incomes have gone down. Most Americans, indeed, are having a tough time. They're working harder for less money to pay more for health care and education and in taxes than they were a decade ago. We have a whole new class of working poor, many of them concentrated in the cities which you lead. People who are the true unsung heroes of America, who get up every day and go to work, and play by the rules and raise their children. Their children most often don't break the law,nd if they lived in Los Angeles, they didn't riot or loot or burn, but they're still falling behind. The government doesn't work for most people, because we've forgotten what it takes to cooperate and to compete and to win in a global economy. You have to put your people first. You have to educate and invest and provide affordable health care to all. And make sure you're doing what it takes to develop the God-given capacities of everybody, because we don't have a person to waste. I have given the American people, beginning on yesterday, this plan which I think you have a copy of, each of you, called "Putting People First." It has no necessary partisan connotation, although it does reject in the strongest possible terms the present state of play in our national government, and the present policies which have been put forward by this administration. It is the right idea, it invests in people and their jobs, and their education, and their health care. It calls for us to cooperate, to be on the same team, to work together so we can compete and win in a tough global economy. It parallels, very closely, many of the recommendations already made by you in the report that you put out not very long ago, which your chairman, Mayor Flynn, and others have so vocally pushed to the United States, and to me personally. My plan is a bold plan. It offers fifty billion dollars in new investments over the next four years in each of the next four years. New incentives for the private sector, an investment tax credit, urban enterprise zones, new business tax incentives, research and development incentives and others. It offers twenty billion dollars a year in hard federal dollars every year for the next four years, to build an economy for the twenty-first century, to invest in new roads and bridges, and streets and rail systems, to develop high-speed rail and a national fiber optic network, to develop new environmental technologies to clean our waters and our air, and to recycle more of our solid wastes. In short, to do those things which we are not doing today. All of you know, as well as I, that our competitors for the future are investing far higher percentages in their income than we are. And it makes me sick inside to think what's going to happen to the incomes in the future of the American people if we don't make a commitment to invest in our capacity and our economy. This twenty billion dollars will create a million jobs a year in each of the next four years, driving funds into your cities. It will help us to do the things you said you wanted, when you issued your call for a thirty-five billion dollar program in one year. This will do more over the next four years. This will enable us to fund those ready-to-go projects you want funded. It will enable us to spend more in infrastructure, and in law enforcement, and in education, and in social services. It will enable us to expand the community development block grant program, which, as a governor, I also believe strongly in. And this will happen without spending one red cent of state or local money or private sector money. When we leverage that, we can dramatically increase this program. The Rebuild America Coalition under the leadership of one of your number, Mayor Maynard Jackson, has recommended a number of things which can be done to leverage more local money and private sector money with this twenty billion dollar commitment, including state revolving loan funds for many projects, and a federal infrastructure development bank, on-bank. I support the recommendations of The Rebuild America Coalition, and I will work hard to leverage this money so that we can generate even more investments and create more jobs. In addition to that, my program will help to make your streets safer. You have here, I know, Commissioner Lee Brown from New York, and Commissioner Bell from Atlanta, two of the nations most vocal proponents of community policing. I have been in many of your cities, and I have seen safer streets. I have seen closed crack houses. I have seen parks where children actually play in them again. In Philadelphia, I shot baskets with Mayor Rindell and street kids who lived in the neighborhood at a city park which was once unsafe for anything but drug dealing. I know community policing works, but I also know that there are three crimes today for every police officer on the street, as compared with thirty years ago when there were three policemen for every crime. And so I have committed in this program to provide to the cities of our nation another hundred thousand police officers over the next few years, through a national police corps, which will be manned by men and women from two sources. Number one, through our national service trust, I want every American to be able to borrow the money to go to college and pay it back, either as a percentage of their income, or in a domestic peace corps solving the problems of America here at home; giving a couple of years of service to our nation at home, just the way that many Americans have gone around the world in the Peace Corps. The federal government would pay the salary, and anyone who worked for two years in a qualified public service job would wipe off their four year college loan. One of those jobs would be in the police forces of the cities of this country. Number two, I want to embrace strongly the suggestion of Senator Sam Nunn, the Chairman of the United States Senate Armed Services Committee, that we give men and women who won the Cold War for us something other than the cold shoulder, as we reduce our military forces. Senator Nunn has suggested that we give men and women who are coming out of the service the opportunity to retrain and become certified as teachers or law-enforcement officers, and then help to pay their way to work for the cities or for the schools, for a period of five years, during which time, they can also earn credit on their military retirement. These two sources together can give us another hundred thousand police officers, so that more of you can have community policing, and we can continue to drive the crime rate down. Chief Brown told me that in New York City, they have now had, because of community policing, reductions in all major areas of crime for the first time in thirty-six years. We can do it in America, we can get ahead of the crime problem. We can restore safety to your streets. There is no more important priority for many people. When I leave you, I'm going to New York, and I'll never forget during the primary one night in a hotel there. A man who was working in the hotel came up to me and he said, "Governor, I'm going to vote for you. My ten-year-old son studies all the candidates in school, and he says I should vote for you. And so I will." I thought, "what a smart boy." But he said, deadly serious, he said, "Governor, where I came from, in my home country, we were much poorer, but at least we were free. Now we are not free. My boy can't go to school unless I walk with him. He can't walk across the street and play in the park, unless I go with him. So if I do what my boy wants, and I vote for you, I want you to make my boy free." That's what I want us to do together, with the National Police Corps. They won't be national, they'll be your police. But we'll give you the people you need to do the job. Finally, let me say that we have to have an education program. I don't know how many mayors have said to me we need Headstart, we need Chapter One, we need programs for our poor kids. We need something for our young adolescents to do. We need programs for them to be involved in if they drop out of school. This plan has those initiatives. Mayor Flynn and I once visited in Boston a program called City Year, maybe the best program of its kind in the country, in which young college students and young dropouts, kids from the top of the totem pole and kids from the bottom, kids who have had to drag themselves up from drug abuse and kids who are the brightest kids in America take time off and work together to help people in the city of Boston from all walks of life. These are the kinds of things that we need to do to bring this country back again. This is what I want you to support. This has been an unusual election year. I noted in the paper yesterday, they're now alleging that Mr. Perot has spent a lot of time trying to investigate President Bush, and we know that Mr. Bush and the Republicans spend a lot of time investigating everybody. And I just spent my time trying to investigate these problems. That may not be the thing to do. But I'll tell you one thing, this country deserves a plan, this country deserves a program, this country deserves action that goes beyond partisan politics. How do we pay for this? About half and half through raising money and cutting spending at the federal level. We have to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share again. Their incomes went up in the 1980's and their taxes went down. We can't ask the middle class to pay more. Their incomes went down and their taxes went up. No nation would do what we have done willingly. For the first time since the "Roaring Twenties", the top one percent of Americans control more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. We must say to the wealthy you have to your fair share. We also have to say to foreign companies, there's something wrong with our tax code, if your income went up sixty-five percent in the 1980's, and your taxes went down fifteen percent. And that's exactly what happened. You've got to pay your fair share if you want to business in this country. But we can't just do that. We also have to change the way the federal government operates too. The general accounting office, Congressman Dorgan's commission on government waste, and my own experience as a governor working, repeatedly cutting budgets and restructuring government tells me that there is a lot of money to save there. I have recommended that we eliminate by attrition, not by firing anybody but by attrition, a hundred thousand people from the federal work force over the next couple of years. We have in the United States still, even though we have very vigorous local governments and state governments, the federal work force still has more employees per capita than does Germany, Japan, or Great Britain. We have to do better. I'm going to cut the White House staff by twenty-five per cent, ask the Congress to pass a bill cutting Congressional staffs by twenty-five per cent. I'm going to stop handing down mandates to you, and regulating you to death, and not giving you the money to do it with. We're going to reform the procurement and inventory practices of the government. We have 1.2 million little bottles of nasal spray in the Pentagon today. We have clothing going back to the fifties. No one is managing these things. We can change. We can do better. We're going to get this money to pay for this program by savings, by cuts, and by raising money where it can be fairly raised. And we're going to adopt the toughest possible system to reform the health care system, and bring health care costs under control. You will never be able to control this government spending until health care costs are brought in line with inflation. And you live in the only advanced country where your nation has not taken a national approach to controlling health care costs by reforming the insurance market, by reducing bureaucracy, simplifying the billing procedures, and doing those things which other countries take for granted to keep costs in line with inflation. We must do that. Now, a lot of people say to me, and this is an important big idea that you have to decide whether you agree with, they say, "Well, Governor, why don't you take all this money and reduce the deficit?" Because under my plan, we will increase investment and reduce the deficit by more than fifty percent over the next four years, but not eliminate it entirely. Why don't you just take it all and put it against the deficit? I'll tell you why, because we have two deficits: a budget deficit and an investment deficit. And we cannot grow this economy until we put people back to work, and until we invest in those things that will give us a high wage, high growth future. We cannot do it. I am appalled at what has happened to the deficit. I can't believe it has quadrupled in twelve years, and investment has declined. But every one of us has borrowed money at some time or another, for a car, for a house, to start a new business or buy a new piece of equipment, or in a city, to build a new sewer system or modernize the street system, or build a new mass transit system. So there are different kinds of borrowing, and when you invest in the future, you create wealth. And you create more wealth than the cost of the borrowing. So I say to you, we cannot afford to ignore the investment deficit. This plan will dramatically reduce the deficit, and dramatically increase investment. That is the only way to get economic growth. You must demand a four-year investment plan. You must go beyond what you have asked for. Go beyond your thirty-five billion dollar one year plan and say we have to invest for four years. Indeed, we have to invest for eight years until the end of this century, if we want America to enter the twenty-first century as the number one economic power. We've got to do it, and you have to demand that it be done. A lot of us have had many different emotional feelings in the last several months. A lot of us have had our own personal feelings in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots. But in every city and town here represented, you see the stories of American lives undone, of American people who are not living up to the fullest of their potential, of people who break the law because they don't think there's any future in playing by the rules. America has always had problems, and we will always have problems. That's endemic to the human condition. What is eating the heart out of this country today is that we have lost two of things that always drive us to do better. First, a faith in the future. More and more of our people do not believe that tomorrow will be better than today. And when you don't believe that, it's pretty hard to get up every day and go to work whether you work in a plant, or in a little business, or on a farm, or in the city hall. And their experience confirms that. We must restore the belief in the faith of the future. The other thing that's killing this country is that most people don't believe they matter very much to their friends and neighbors. We don't have the sense of community that we need that embraces people across racial and ethnic lines and income lines. Most people really believe that, except for one or two folks, they just don't count for much. And when people don't think they count for much, then they join a gang, because everybody wants to be part of something where they're important. I mean, when I was a kid coming up, I was in a gang, it's just we didn't break the law. It was a good gang. You come here to the Conference of Mayors and you commiserate to each how you got more mandates and less money. This is a gang. You all cry in your beer together and feel sorry for yourself about how bad it is. We all have to be something where we matter. So when you strip it all away, the reason I want to invest fifty billion dollars a year in America for four year -- yes, so we can recover our economic leadership -- but basically so people can feel inside again that tomorrow is going to be better, so they feel like getting up in the morning and going to work, and being part of something important. And so they can believe in the idea of America again, that this is the greatest country in the world because this is a place where everybody counts. And I think that's what the Conference of Mayors was asking for, when it put forth its visionary bi- partisan program. And that's what I'm trying to give this country. We can all give our speeches, and we can all give our talks. We can all plead our cases, we can all tell our stories. But at the end of the day, what will matter is whether we have done anything to change the human condition of people in our country and the future of this great land. This will change the future. Thank you very much.