As we reduce defense spending, I ask Congress to invest more in the technologies of tomorrow. Defense conversion will keep us strong militarily and create jobs for our people here at home.
As we protect our environment, we must invest in the environmental technologies of the future which will create jobs. This year we will fight for a revitalized Clean Water Act and a Safe Drinking Water Act and a reformed Superfund program.
And the vice president is right; we must also work with the private sector to connect every classroom, every clinic, every library, every hospital in America into a national information superhighway by the year 2000. Think of it. Instant access to information will increase productivity. It will help to educate our children. It will provide better medical care. It will create jobs. And I call on the Congress to pass legislation to establish that information superhighway this year.
As we expand opportunity and create jobs, no one can be left out. We must continue to enforce fair lending and fair housing and all civil rights laws, because America will never be complete in its renewal until everyone shares in its bounty. But we all know, too, we can do all these things-- put our economic house in order, expand world trade, target the jobs of the future, guarantee equal opportunity.
But if we’re honest, we’ll all admit that this strategy still cannot work unless we also give our people the education, training and skills they need to seize the opportunities of tomorrow. We must set tough, world-class academic and occupational standards for all our children and give our teachers and students the tools they need to meet them.
Education
Our Goals 2000 proposal will empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations or having more public school choice, to do whatever they wish to do as long as we measure every school by one high standard: Are our children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy?
Goals 2000 links world-class standards to grassroots reforms and I hope Congress will pass it without delay. Our school to work initiative will for the first time link school to the world of work, providing at least one year of apprenticeship beyond high school. After all, most of the people we’re counting on to build our economic future won’t graduate from college. It’s time to stop ignoring them and start empowering them. We must literally transform our outdated unemployment system into a new reemployment system. The old unemployment system just sort of kept you going while you waited for your old job to come back. We’ve got to have a new system to move people into new and better jobs because most of those old jobs just don’t come back. And we know that the only way to have real job security in the future, to get a good job with a growing income, is to have real skills and the ability to learn new ones. So we’ve got to streamline today’s patchwork of training programs and make them a source of new skill for our people who lose their jobs. Reemployment, not unemployment, must become the centerpiece of our economic renewal. I urge you to pass it in this session of Congress.
Welfare
And just as we must transform our unemployment system, so must we also revolutionize our welfare system. It doesn’t work; it defies our values as a nation. If we value work, we can’t justify a system that makes welfare more attractive than work if people are worried about losing their health care.