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House Journal: Page 1888: Tuesday, April 25, 1995

The main reason I ran for President is, it seemed to me that we
were seeing a national government in bipartisan gridlock, where
we'd had 12 years in which we exploded the deficit, reduced our
investment in people, and undermined our ability to compete and
win in the world. And I wanted very badly to end the kind of
gridlock we'd had and to see some real concrete action taken to
go forward, because of my experience doing what you're doing now.
My basic belief is that the government ought to do more to help
people help themselves, to reward responsibility with more
opportunity, and not to give anybody opportunity without
demanding responsibility. That's basically what I think our job
is.
I think we can be less bureaucratic. We have to enhance security
at home and abroad. But the most important thing we have to do
is to empower people to make the most of their own lives.
Now, we have made a good beginning at that. As I said, we've
been able to get the deficit down. You know here in Iowa,
because you're a farming state, that we've that the biggest
expansion of trade in the last two years we've seen in a
generation. We now have a $20 billion surplus in agricultural
products for the first time ever - this means more to me that
you - but we're selling rice to the Japanese, something that my
farmers never thought that we'd every do. We're selling apples
to Asia. we are doing our best in Washington - some of us are -
to get the ethanol program up and going. This administration is
for it, and I hope you will help us that that.
And we're making modest efforts which ought to be increased to
work with the private sector to develop alternative agricultural
products. Today I saw corn-based windshield wiper fluid, and
something that I think is important, biodegradable,
agriculturally-rooted golf tees. An a lot of other things that I
think will be the hall mark of our future. We have only
scratched the surface of what we can do to produce products from
the land, from our food and fiber, and we must do more.
In education we are beginning to see the outlines of what I hope
will be a genuine bipartisan national partnership in education.
In the last two years we increased head Start, we reduced the
rules and regulations the federal government imposes on local
school systems, but gave them more funds and flexibility to meet
national standards of education. We helped states all over the
country to develop comprehensive systems of apprenticeships for
young people who get out of high school and don't want to go to
college, but don't want to be a dead-end jobs.
We are doing more to try to make out job training programs
relevant. And we have made literally millions of Americans
eligible for lower cost, better repayment college loans under
our direct loan program, including over 350,000 students and
former students in Iowa - including all those who are at Iowa
State University. Now, if you borrow money under that program,
you get it quicker with less paper work at lower cost, and you
can pay it back in one of four different ways based on the
income you're going to earn when you get out of college. Believe
it or not, it lowers costs to the taxpayers.
And we have demanded responsibility. We've taken the loan
default costs to the taxpayers from $2.8 billion a year down to
$1 billion a year. That is the direction we ought to be going in.
We've worked hard to increase our security at home and abroad.
The crime bill, which was passed last year by the Congress after
six years of endless debate,

Iowa General Assembly

Index: House Journal (76th General Assembly: Session 1)

© 1995 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

Comments? hjourn@legis.iowa.gov.

Last update: Sun Jan 14 21:05:02 CST 1996
URL: /DOCS/GA/76GA/Session.1/HJournal/01800/01888.html
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