GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON ADDRESS AT MACOMB COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENT CENTER THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 1992 Thank you very much. And thank you President Lorenzo and thank you all for being here. I've looked forward to this day for a long time because, as I'm sure you all know, this county has become a very famous county in American politics: A county of people who were native Democrats who have basically been voting Republican in Presidential elections. A county not unlike my native region, the South, and my state, which was a very Democratic state; a state that voted for Adlai Stevenson twice against Dwight Eisenhour; a state overwhelmingly white Protestant that still voted narrowly for John Kennedy against Richard Nixon; a state that voted for Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater. And then we voted for Wallace in '68. Nixon got 69-percent of the vote in '72. Jimmy Carter won there in '76 because he seemed to be a lot like us. And then Reagan won, Reagan won, and Bush won big time in my state. And I was on the ballot all this time trying to stand up in the midst of all this. And I think I know why a lot people in this county and my state departed the Democratic party and got involved with the Republicans. I heard it over and over again: "You know your party in Washington doesn't share my values anymore. They're not rewarding middle-class effort and middle-class values. They won't stand up for the country around the world." I've heard all of these things for so long. But, now we are sort of at a crossroads as a country. I hear that also where I live. We're coming to another Presidential election at the end of the three slowest years of economic growth since before World War II and, more importantly, at the end of more than a decade of economic decline. There were two stunning studies which came out in the last couple of weeks. You may have seen it, and a lot of you -- even if you didn't see it -- you won't be surprised because you have doubtless lived it. One of the studies said that over the last twenty years, the average family has worked harder and harder, not less and less; that in 1989 the average family was working one month per year longer than in 1969. The other survey said, it was a study that the Joint Economic Committee released in Washington the other day pointing out that in the last 12 years, 60% of the growth in this country has gone to the top one percent of the people who live here. That's a stunning statistic: that the top 20% have gotten 30% of the growth; the next 20% have gotten 9%t, the next 20% four percent, the bottom 40% nothing. They've fallen behind. If you are in the middle; if you've got the four or the nine; you don't even get anything because we've spent so much more for health care, housing, education, and in taxes. What that means is, for the last twelve years, basically all of the growth in this country has gone to the top 20%. Sixty percent to the top one percent. So what has happened in this decade in which the American people voted for people who have promised to honor their values and stand up for everything that is best in this country? The middle class is working harder, making less money. We've lost our economic leadership; our kids are in terrible trouble. The President goes to Japan and is humiliated at the end of a trade mission in which the Japanese Prime Minister says he feels sympathy for the United States. Sympathy for us! And then he says, showing that he doesn't understand it either, he says it's because we've lost our work ethic. But, that isn't true. We're working harder than we were 20 years ago. So, what did happen, and what are we going to do about it? Why am I running for President, and what's going to be different? Well, first of all, I really believe that this election is not about the traditional divisions in Washington, D.C. between liberals and conservatives, and left and right, and even Republicans and Democrats. To me, this is a race between the 80's and the 90's, and whether we're going to have a new economic policy for the 90's and a new social policy. I've been out here as a governor for 11 years, having a balanced budget, making tough decisions, trying to keep people's jobs for them, helping them educate their children, trying to solve problems, and getting very little help from Washington to do it. If people, like people who live in this county, hadn't voted for me, I'd be doing something else today. I wouldn't be up here talking to you. I live in state with only two-and-a-half million people, where even my enemies smile and call me by my first name. So, I have given a lot of thought to this. And here's what I think we ought to do: Number one, our economic policy ought to put our own people first again. It ought to reward work and family and effort, and not just wealth and power. We ought to focus on education and training for a lifetime, so that people can always be competitive in a global economy. We should give business incentive to invest, but only those incentives that will guarantee investment in our country. John Kennedy had an investment tax credit. You couldn't get it unless you bought plant equipment and put it into our plants. We have a tax system that today encourages you to move plants overseas, rather than leave them at home. Let me just give you a couple of descriptions. Let's take a General Motors plant. OK? I want to come back to the General Motors situation. But, just suppose you are in the car business and you got about 100 million dollars worth of equipment. If you want to keep high wage jobs in America and keep in production, under the present tax laws, you don't get any investment tax credit, that is, any real accelerated write-off for this equipment. So, suppose you say I think I'll take this old equipment and take it to another country where people work for wages we can't live on. So, you shut the plant down, you get a tax deduction for the cost of shutting the plant down, you move the plant overseas and it costs you money the first year or so to set it up. You get to carry forward the loss in your American tax bill. Then you build up the money and you keep it over there and as long as you don't put the money back here in a bank, you don't have to take those earnings and put those earnings here and pay taxes on them. So, if you look at the whole framework of the tax system we've got, you would think your country was telling you, `we don't care whether you keep these jobs here or not.' That's the tax system we have. But, if we had a people-first economics, we'd be investing more in education and training, in incentives to keep jobs here, and we'd be organizing to deal with these changes. We have no automobile strategy. You know what your country's automobile policy is? Does your country have a policy for changing from a defense to a domestic economy? We're cutting defense spending all over America. We've got factory workers in the street, technicians without jobs, scientists and engineers who don't know what they're going to do. Do we have strategies for them? No. Somehow, this invisible market is supposed to figure out what happens to them. Because we have tried to put money first, that is, keep taxes low in upper income people in corporations and forget about developing human capacity. That's why I wanted to come here to give this talk today. Because the average young person will change work eight times in a lifetime. And if you don't have a continuous system of education; if you don't have a tax system that rewards investment in our country; and if you don't have a government that's trying to organize people for change, you get hurt. The second thing we need to do, I think, is to recognize that we got killed in the 1980's by doing something as a nation most of you would never do in your families, and that is giving everybody something for nothing, starting at the top. I want to change that. Consider the case of General Motors. In the early 80's, they asked for tax cuts, and they got it. They asked for protection from imports, and they got it. They asked for regulatory relief, and they got it. They asked the auto workers to give them concessions, and they got 'em and they got 'em and they got 'em. Look at this Flint, Michigan plant -- probably the most innovative plant in America for worker concessions -- changing the work rules. No foreman people making decisions on the shop floor, an exciting productive place: They're going to close it anyway. And what do we get in return for that? All those concessions. They kept raising the price of cars and giving up market share. They didn't reinvest a lot of that money in the production process. A lot of the inefficiencies in auto working in America are not due to labor -- that's only twenty percent of the costs now. It's due to the inefficiencies in the production process itself and the fact that we use more scrap metal and we have more waste than our Japanese and German competitors. We didn't require them to fix that. That's a management problem, not a labor problem. And the executives continue to raise their pay and their perks, while the workers got the shaft. So we gave something for nothing, and we got what you would get if you ran your family that way. And what I think we need to do in the 90's is say, `OK, we are going to try this a different way.' We're going to have more opportunity and more responsibility. So, if you are at the top of the totem pole, more tax incentives to invest in our country -- no more tax incentives to move your plants overseas, or for unlimited increases in corporate compensation that don't have anything to do with whether or not you are putting people to work and making something people are buying. If you are a worker, yes, we want you to change your work rules. But, you get in return for that: Lifetime education, affordable health care, and a sensible economic policy. If you are on welfare, we are going to do something for you. We will give you more education and training, child care for your children, health care for your children; and you've got to take a job. If you are a student, we want to give you more opportunities. But there ought to be national standards -- a national exam system that really means something. We've got some teachers here. They will tell you that all of these standardized tests were're giving in America today make money for the testing companies, and not much else. After you give them a couple of years, all of the kids in American are scoring above the national average and the teachers are burdened down teaching to the test. So, you wind up seeming like you've got something you don't. I want to make it possible for every high school graduate to either get two years of further training in an apprenticeship program if they behave themselves, play by the rules, and graduate; or to find the money necessary to go to college. Let me give you another example. I don't know how many families I have talked to who have been told by their college aid folks that they are too rich to go to college. Anybody here in that category? Been told that your family couldn't get any help? Here's what I think we ought to do: I want to scrap this student loan problem we've got and set in its place a national service trust fund out of which any American could borrow the money to go to college. But you'd have to pay it back. And you couldn't beat the bill, like you can the student loan bill sometimes. You'd pay it back in one of two ways: Either as a small percentage of income over time at tax time -- not to the local bank at tax time; or you could work for a year or two in a form of national service -- like a GI Bill at home. Come home after you graduate from college. Be a teacher, be a law enforcement officer, work with troubled youth, work in a drug center. Do something to help solve the problems of our country to pay off your student loan. We could educate a whole generation of Americans and help solve a lot of our problems. I'll give you another example. In Chicago, there's a public housing program that gives tenants, who've never had jobs in their life, the opportunity to work in their own housing projects on 24 - hour a day shifts in partnership with police officers to clean out the drugs and the weapons in all of the housing projects and keep them safe. So that you get the right to earn a living if you work with law enforcement to keep your living environment safe. I could give you lots and lots of other examples. I'll give you another example that I think is important. Look at all of these kids that are in trouble with drugs. I spent a lot of time in my life talking to people who were in gangs, talking to people who had gotten in trouble. Almost all of them have no education, come from broken homes, live in difficult neighborhoods, and grew up in an environment where the best money was in drugs. Whatever happens to them now. Now what happens to them is nothing the first two or three times. And then, after a while, they get into trouble and we send them to jail where, at great cost to us, they learn how to be first-class criminals. Then, they get out after a while, and they do it again, and it goes on for life. Why not try something different? Why not have in every community of any size in America a community-based, boot-camp-like facility, where people who get into trouble, get discipline, drug treatment, real education, do community service work, and have a chance to develop some relationships with adults who will both give them love and discipline and give them a chance to get reconnected to society. These are the kinds of things I think we have to look at. Opportunity plus responsibility, no more something for nothing. Now, let me just make one final point. You can't do any of this unless we are prepared to give up some of the prejudices we all had in the 80's, or a lot of people did. The problems are not racial in nature. This is a crisis of economics, of values. It has nothing to do with race. This is the message, the message that I just gave you, that I just gave to the south. Over 80-percent of the black voters voted for me on Super Tuesday. Why? Because most blacks work for a living. Most of the working poor who are being ground down in the South are black Americans. There are more whites than blacks on welfare. The systems that are killing us are not racial in nature. This is a crisis of values, of education, and of organization. One of the things that the Democrats I think have to stand and draw the line on, and one of the things that I have to tell you about is that I do not believe we have any hope of doing what we have to do in America unless we can come together and cross racial lines again. One in four of our children is living in poverty under the age of six. One in two minority children under the age of six in poverty. Most of the jobs in the 1990's will be filled by women and members of racial minorities. That's just the demographics. You can't repeal that. Nobody can change that. That's where the population growth is. And a lot of those folks are in terrible trouble. And people who give easy answers. Look at the Republican race baiting. Duke, even the Republicans got rid of him. Why? All he did, he talked about welfare reform. He was a state legislator. He never hit a lick to move anybody from welfare to work because he would'nt have anybody to kick around anymore. It was a code word for race. Go talk to people on welfare. They hate it. But you've got to give them the power, the opportunity to go to work, and then impose the responsibility to work. You can't do one without the other. No more entitlement. But no more rhetoric without empowerment. Take Buchanan. Buchanan comes to the South to campaign. He goes to a Confederate cemetery but won't walk across the street to the black cemetery - sending the signal one more time that that's the problem. And I'm telling you, that's not the problem. I grew up in an integrated society that was segregated. My whole region was kept poor and backward because the people who were running the politics knew as long as they could separate us by race, they could hold us down. A little moment in American history: Arkansas and Michigan were approved for admission into the union at the same time. Did you know that? And we came in just a few months before Michigan did. We were approved under an agreement then available in Congress that both states had to be Andy Jackson democratic states, but one would be a slave state, mine, and one would be a free state, yours. All right? One of the reasons that we never could get our act together in the South is that we were so polarized over race for so long. Bush runs this Willie Horton ad on Dukakis last time. Now, Dukakis ran into it because he didn't answer it. But the federal government furloughs prisoners too. Did you know that? I mean they had a furlough program. They were churning them out too. All the time Bush was running this ad against Dukakis, there's this federal furlough program opening the jails letting people out. Why? Because we now have more people behind bars than any other nation in the world as a percentage of our people. So the answer is not Willie Horton. The answer is who should you keep behind bars, what can you do about the others, and what are we doing about crime. This guy runs Willie Horton, scares the living daylights out of people, then cuts back on aid to local prosecutors, cuts back on aid to local law enforcement, ask the sheriff, cuts back on aid to the customs, the coast guard, the border patrol, all of the people who are supposed to keep drugs out of this country. It is not a racial issue. And the one thing that is going to pull this country together is somebody has got to come back to the so-called Reagan Democratic areas and say, `look, I'll give you your values back, I'll restore the economic leadership, I'll help you build the middle class back,' but you've got to say, `OK, let's do it with everybody in this country.' In Chicago today, I went to a little business, 107 employees - blacks, Puerto Ricans, other Hispanics, a guy from Romania fixing to cast his first vote for me, Poles - all of them together. And you know what they said? They work and they went to school at work, at a big GED program. And they all talked about how the more education they got, the more secure they got in their jobs and the more productive they were. And the more their wages went up, the more fun it was to be working with all different kinds of people. It's amazing how, when your life works, you don't feel those resentments. It's amazing when you work with people who share your values, and who are winning, all the reservations that you might have kind of fade away. And that's the last thing I guess I want to say. If I get elected President, maybe I'll give a few good talks, but I can't change this country unless the American people are willing to be Americans again. We got to say we are going up or down together. So that's my message to you here. I'm trying to give you a new Democratic party based on old values that will make you want to come home to the Democrats in this county. But I'm telling you, there is nothing I can do to get out of the fact that we have got to come together around values and across racial lines. And if we're not prepared to do it we are not going to make it as a country because, if you look at who's going to be filling the jobs of tomorrow, they are people whose children are doing bullet drills instead of fire drills in school, who are working hard and are still poor, who are living in substandard housing and who need these empowerment strategies. So, I just hope and I pray that each of you in your own way and all of the people who live here will think about that. What would it take for this county to embrace a Democrat again based on opportunity, responsibility, people-based politics? And let's forget about race and be one nation again. Thank you very much.