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"Work, Family, Future" Address to the American Association of Retired Persons Governor Bill Clinton Henry Gonzales Convention Center San Antonio, Texas June 4, 1992 Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much President Burgess, ladies and gentlemen. I am so honored to be invited to be here with you today. I appreciate the warm welcome on coming in. It is an amazing thing to be through this long string of presidential primaries where I learned a lot about not only how much we have in common, but how different we are as Americans. I'm always amazed at each day I learn something about how American people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions from it. And since I am here at the AARP, I thought I would tell you a story I heard the other day that illustrates this point so well -- about a couple who'd been married just a little over fifty years. They were sitting out on their porch rocking in their chairs, and the husband looked at his wife and he said, "Sarah, you know we've been together a long time." And she said, "Yes." And he said, "I'm really a man of few words -- all these years there are so many things I should have said to you that I didn't." She said, "Yeah." He said, "You know, we got married in the depression and you believed in me, but it was the depression. And not long after we got married our little business went down and I was flat broke, but you hung in there with me." And she said, "Yeah, I did." He said, "Then I went off to World War II and I got that bad wound, and it took me a year to overcome it, but you hung in there with me everyday." She said, "Yeah, I did." He said, "Then after the war, we finally moved into our own home for the first time and six months later a tornado came along and blew it down. It took us six years to get in our house again, but you hung in there with me, didn't you." And she said, "Yes, I did." And he said, "Well, Sarah, before it is too late, I just want to tell you one thing. Honey, you're bad luck." So, if you want to be involved in this enterprise on which I have embarked, you have to be willing to have people see facts in a different way than you do. In that connection, I want to compliment your president for the theme of this conference: generations coming together. As governor, I have worked hard to serve the retired people of my state -- one of the states with the highest percentage of people over 65 in the United States. But, I want to be president to restore the promise of the American Dream for our children. When I was a freshman at Georgetown University 28 years ago, I had a professor of Western Civilization who said that the very special thing about our civilization in general, and the United States in particular, is that we had always believed that the future could be better than the present, and that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so. That's what I want to talk about today -- beyond the talk of Democrats and Republicans, beyond pointing the finger of blame to the assumption of responsibility. For the plain truth is that millions of our fellow citizens of all ages do not believe the future will be better than the present, and millions more do not believe they have a personal, moral responsibility to make it so. I learned the American Dream and I lived the American Dream as a child growing up in Arkansas. Nearly half a century ago, I was born in a little town called Hope. Somebody's here from there, probably. We're everywhere now. I have two delegates from Chicago who were born in Hope -- one from Queens. We're way over our quota. My father died in a car wreck three months before I was born. My mother went back to nursing school so that she could earn a living to support me. Until I was four, I was raised by loving grandparents of modest means but great determination. They taught me to read and count when I was two and three. They taught me in their own way that our country isn't just another place, it's an idea -- a solid covenant that spans generations, a commitment to uphold the values we learn in our families -- to honor our parents and grandparents, to offer a helping hand to our sisters and brothers, to protect and provide for our children and our children's children. I learned from my grandparents the basic contract of American life that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will be rewarded. That promise has come true for me beyond my wildest dreams. But as I have traveled across this great nation of ours, I've met too many good, hardworking people for whom that promise has been broken. Coming over here today, I couldn't help remembering the encounter I had in Nashua, New Hampshire with a couple named Mary Annie and Edward Davis, who broke down crying telling me how every week they had to chose between their food and the medicine they needed to stay alive and healthy. People like them have done right by America and now it's time for America to do right by them. One of the reasons I entered this race for president is that I was tired of seeing people being punished for their devotion to work and family, to country, and community. If any Americans have kept faith with the American promise, it's the generation that worked their way out of the Great Depression, brought their way to victory over Nazism and Fascism, led the way through the Cold War and sacrificed to provide my generation with opportunities our parents never had. I'm going to be a president who does right by older Americans because you've done right by America. And your country owes you that. Doing right means understanding that Social Security is a commitment that must be kept, not just for today's beneficiaries, but to today's working people who are paying into the system for their tomorrows. It's a covenant -- Social Security -- a covenant between generations, and I will honor that. Doing right means understanding, that in spite of Medicare, most senior citizens still pay too much for health care. In fact, a recent study found that the average elderly person is actually paying a higher percentage of income for health care today than in 1965 -- just before Medicare was enacted in the first place. During the first year of my administration, we'll send a national health plan to Congress to control the cost of health care by taking on the insurance and health care and government bureaucracies that add tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary costs to our system. My plan will provide a comprehensive package of benefits and have measures to discourage excessive cost and especially to hold down the price of prescription drugs. The plan will include long term care for the elderly and the disabled -- charging people based on their ability to pay -- and will emphasize greater choice in care, from home to nursing home service. After you've worked hard all of your life you shouldn't be wiped out by serious illness and you should have as much control over your own life as possible. America is the only advanced nation in the world without a national health plan. We spend 30% more of our income on health care than any of our major competitors, and we do less with it. And we lag behind them as a result on many measures of health care from infant mortality, to heart disease, to life expectancy. We also, I might add, are dramatically underfunding women's health research and development in areas from breast cancer to ovarian cancer to osteoporosis and that's why the bill now in the Congress ought to pass for new health investment. As you know so well, Americans pay more for prescription drugs than the citizens of nations who have national health plans. This is a special burden to elderly people who aren't poor enough to be on Medicaid but aren't rich enough to pay their bills themselves. Their numbers are legion. Mary Annie and Edward Davis are but two of the hundreds of thousands of them. As the Senate Special Committee on Aging, chaired by my good friend and fellow Arkansan, David Pryor found, prices of prescription drugs during the last decade have risen by three times the rate of inflation. And to add insult to injury, some American drug companies charge Americans more for the same products here than they charge people in other countries. That's wrong and I want to change it. That's why I support Senator Pryor's bill to take away tax breaks for drug companies to raise their prices more than the rate of inflation. When you go to the doctor or the drug store or the hospital, your next stop shouldn't be the poor house. These issues have long been a concern to me. Fifteen years ago, as one of America's youngest attorney generals, I created the Advocates for the Elderly Program to help older people with their legal problems. As governor of my state I led the nation's governors in fighting to stop the unfair termination of Social Security disability benefits. In Arkansas, we started a long-term care program called Elder Choices, which let seniors use money normally reserved for nursing home care for long-term care services of their own choice -- from personal care to home health care to adult day care. The country I want to lead will honor its obligations to people who've worked hard all their lives. But I also have to come here today to challenge you and all older Americans to honor our obligations to our nation's children because our future depends on their strength, their intelligence, their skills, their citizenship. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, our country has made progress in reducing poverty among older Americans. We can all be proud of the fact that, beginning in 1985, for the first time in the history of America, the elderly were less poor than the rest of America. By contrast, poverty has exploded among our children. Our new poor in America are young children and their mothers -- most of whom are working mothers -- and we cannot be proud of that. We can't be proud that 13% of America's children have no health coverage whatever; that 30% of all of our pre-schoolers are not immunized against mumps, measles, and rubella; that every year 40,000 babies born in the United States die before their first birthday. And many more are born with very low birth weights, imposing great costs on society and bearing mental and physical limitations which may dog them throughout their lives and further undermine their ability to be contributing citizens. We can't be proud of the fact that 20% of all children under eighteen and 25% of all children under six are living under poverty; that teenage boys are more likely to die from gunshot wounds than natural causes; that each year a half-a-million American children do not finish high school, and millions more stop there with no further education, thus condemned to losing out in the tough global competition in which what you earn depends on what you can learn. It is astonishing to note that families under the age of 30 are earning more than 25% less than what their counterparts were seventeen years ago. We cannot be proud of this because today's children are tomorrow's workers, tomorrow's tax payers, tomorrow's parents, tomorrow's citizens. If they grow up malnourished, unhealthy, and unprepared to compete in the 21st century, then America will be neither safe nor solvent, neither prosperous nor powerful. We must not neglect our children and let their decline be the legacy of our generation. They are the national security issue of 1992. As all of you know, we know what works. We know what works in raising children -- how to help them grow up healthy and hopeful, loving and learning, and ready to build their futures and libraries and laboratories instead of giving their lives away to gangs and guns on our meanest streets. Mr. Bush says when it comes to investing in America, we have more will than wallet. What I say, now that we've won the Cold War, we've got to find the will to invest in our people, in our jobs, in our education, in our health care and reclaim our own legacy. We have the wallet to spend over $100 billion on the savings and loan bailout in this year alone. We have the wallet to let health care cost go up two and three times the rate of inflation with the money going straight to insurance and bureaucracy while our competitors hold them down. We have the wallet to keep protecting Germany from the Soviet threat, while German factory workers earn 20% more than Americans for a shorter work week, and the Germans invest in the former Soviet Republics, while the former Soviet Republics slash their own defense budgets far more than we have cut ours. And in the 1980's, we had the wallet to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, while raising taxes on the middle class, slashing our investments in the future, and exploding the federal deficit. I know that the generation that won World War II and the Cold War has the vision and the will and the discipline to join this crusade to invest in our young people and reinvigorate our economy. Your generation has sweated and sacrificed and died for others. You've never had the attitude, "I've got mine, you get lost." At the end of World War II, you led a strong America in rebuilding Europe and Japan. At the end of the Cold War, you must lead us in rebuilding America -- in regaining our commitment to the future. You can teach all Americans lessons in patriotism, and citizenship, and responsibility. As president, I must challenge you, and all Americans, to support a new national commitment to provide every baby born in the United States with a healthy start in life from health care and nutrition for expectant mothers and their infants to immunization for young children. I will challenge you and all Americans to provide pre school for every child who needs it by finally fully funding Head Start so all our children can start school ready to learn. All this is in your self-interest and in our national interest. If we don't fully fund Head Start today, we may not be able to fully fund Social Security twenty years from now. As president, I must challenge you and all Americans to help make every American school a model school because all our children deserve the best. I will challenge you and all Americans to support a domestic GI Bill -- a domestic peace corp that will offer college loans to every American of every age willing to repay the loan or give a couple of years of service back to our community here at home -- not a peace corp for abroad, but a peace corp for America. Think of it as we are here in San Antonio. If every young person from San Antonio, or El Paso, or Laredo, or Houston, or Dallas, or Texarkana, or Lubbock, if every one of them got a college education from a national service loan and came home to work as a police officer, a teacher, in a drug rehabilitation program, with kids in trouble, we could solve the problems of America at home and educate a whole generation of Americans. It would be the best money we ever spent. For those who do not want to go to college, we should follow our competitors and give every high school graduate at least two years of further education and training on the job with a national apprenticeship program to restore the dignity of blue collar work in America. In order to do this, we must have the discipline to control health care costs -- which is the single most important force in the exploding federal deficit today -- to reinvest all of our defense costs in rebuilding the American economy, and to ask upper income Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. Those who received most of the benefits of the 1980's should shoulder more of the burden of the 1990's. Let me be specific, although it may not be politically popular. If your income went up and your taxes went down in the last twelve years, if family income is over $200,000, you should pay more. We cannot ask the middle class to pay more. Their incomes went down and their taxes went up in the 1980's. I support a higher rate for the richest Americans and a sur-tax on millionaires, such as that recommended in the recent tax bill sponsored by Senator Lloyd Bentsen and vetoed by the president. And if an older American on Medicare has an income in excess of $125,000 a year, I think there should be a higher price for Medicare if, in return, you get control of health care costs and a sensible system of long-term care. No one should be forced to pay for the same old system and just take money out of private pocket and send it direct to health care companies or a bureaucracy that is out of control. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it without some sacrifice from those most able to make it. The days of something for nothing for a few at the top are over. To make America work again, we need more incentives for private investment and new plant and equipment, to start new businesses, to invest in the most depressed areas of our cities and rural America. We also need more direct investment in education and in health care in our future. Unless those whose incomes went up while their taxes went down in the 80's pay their fair share, we simply cannot afford to increase these investments and bring down our huge deficit. These are problems we must all face. I also hope you will support other policies which reinforce the values of work and family. For all of those working poor families I talked about, how about a simple tax system that says we will increase the earned income tax credit so that if you work forty hours a week and you've got children in the house you will be lifted above the poverty line. How about a welfare reform system that says we'll invest more in your education and training and child care and medical coverage, but you have to go to work. We have to end welfare as we know it. How about providing more choices for elderly people in long-term care and more choices among public schools for parents and their children so there will be some competition but no private vouchers to deplete the limited resources of our public education system. How about the toughest possible system of child support enforcement so people can't bring kids into this world, cross the state line, and leave them for the government to raise. That's the kind of thing we ought to be supporting. How about a safe streets initiative that will bring police back to the blocks everyday, walking the same streets, working with the same neighbors, enlisting the energies of people to shut down the crack houses and open up the city parks. These are the kind of programs we need in America today. And so I say to the AARP, I respect the theme of this conference. I ask you to live it. I ask you to go home and ask your fellow Americans to reach across generational lines. As I said at the beginning, I was raised by my grandparents until I was four. I spent a lot of time with my great-grandparents who lived out in the country in what would be called a shack today. They were poor, but they were loving and strong people. They made me feel loved and know discipline. They gave me self-esteem and respect for others. In the governor's office in Arkansas, I've got a picture of my grandmother in grade school in 1916, a picture a my grandfather at the furnace of a sawmill in 1923, a picture of my great-grandfather holding my hand in a hospital room in 1952. It's a long way in America from the photographs I have on my wall to our meanest streets where children don't know who their grandparents are, too often have to worry about their parents' own behavior and even drug abuse, and where too many join gangs to find the extended family I knew naturally as a child. America's future needs an investment of your time as well as money. America's children need grandparents, even if they are not their own. I want to lift the earnings limit on Social Security but I know our Social Security depends on your time being given over to more than earnings. The elderly people of this country could revolutionize the lives of troubled children of America through volunteer programs in schools and communities all across this land. For America is a dream every child must cherish, a promise every generation must keep, a legacy we must leave to our children and our grandchildren. And so I challenge you not only to fight and strive and struggle to save social security, but also to preserve, protect and defend the security of our children; to fight not only to keep medicare strong and stable but to make our economy grow and prosper; to work not only to keep older Americans out of poverty but to lift our children up as well. Support programs that reflect our shared values, putting the future ahead of the present, moving people from welfare to work, establishing tough child support, lifting the working poor, creating a new system of national service for college education and more. Work, family, future -- that is what we must honor and reward. Together we can end this era of every person for himself and begin the era of we're all in this together. Together we can do for America, what America did for Europe and Japan at the end of World War II: build a prosperous and powerful new economy with millions of new jobs and dozens of new industries with people who are healthy and strong, and children who believe the future will be better than the present. Most of all, we can leave our children a nation that is stronger, freer and richer than the one we inherited. That must, in the end, be the true measure of our legacy as Americans: did we leave this world better than we found it? Today, the answer would be no, tomorrow the answer can be yes. It is that question on which this coming election depends. Thank you, and God bless you all.