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THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(San Francisco, California)
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release February 26, 1998
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO TECHNOLOGY '98 CONFERENCE
Ritz Carlton Hotel
San Francisco, California
11:30 A.M. PST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. I also want to thank
whoever turned the lights on. (Laughter.) When Sandy and I first came out,
you were all in the dark, and the lights were very bright. And I thought
there was something rather anomalous about my coming to a high-tech conference
and you being in the dark. (Laughter.)
Actually, I had to fight with the Vice President to see who
would get to come here today. Here's a guy who lives and breathes to talk
about teriflops (ph) and gigabytes. But I pulled rank. (Laughter.) And so
here we are.
Thank you, Sandy, for your leadership and your kind remarks,
and thank you for your friendship and your wise counsel. I'm very grateful.
I am delighted to be here. In many ways, I think my trip here
today would be sort of like a President going to Pennsylvania in the 1890s to
see the people who first struck oil, or transformed iron ore into steel, the
people who built our great Industrial Revolution America, for you have mined
the myriad possibilities of the silicon chip, and likewise, have transformed
America.
For those of us, like Congresswoman Pelosi and others who
serve in the national government, it's a very interesting challenge trying to
assess where we are, where we're going, make the right decisions, and do it in
a way that enables us to make the most of all this change while being true to
our most fundamental values.
These are good times for America. Sandy talked
about it. We are almost now up to 15 million new jobs in the
last year and one month. We have the lowest unemployment in 24
years; the lowest crime rate in 24 years; the lowest welfare
rolls in 27 years; the lowest inflation in 30 years; we're about
to have our first balanced budget in 30 years; the highest home
ownership in the history of America. These are good times.
The economic strategy that we have embraced to
balance the budget, but to invest more in our people and their
future and to trade more around the world is working. But I
think everyone who has studied this economy believes that at the
dawn of a new century the strength of our economy, the health and
prosperity of our people, indeed, the very security of our nation
will depend more than ever on the scientific and technological
revolution that so many of you have helped to set in motion.
Today, over 4 million Americans work in
technology-related industries, earning 70 percent above average
incomes. There are 70 new companies a week that start here in
Northern California alone in high-tech areas. There are new
industries -- biotechnology, super computers. But some of the
most profound revolutions have occurred in old industries.
Indeed, a great deal of information technology research and
development is taking place in real estate, in services, in
wholesale and retail trade, in construction, in transportation.
The Ford Taurus that you drive today has more computer power than
the Apollo 11 did that Neil Armstrong took to the Moon. It's an
interesting time.
I came today to talk about what we can do to build
on this progress by, in particular, promoting and expanding the
fastest growing social and economic community in history -- the
Internet. Ten years ago, it was still the province of
scientists, an obscure project developed by the Defense
Department. Five years ago, the World Wide Web barely existed; I
think there were about 50 sites. Today, there are 1.5 million
new web pages created every day, 65,000 every hour. This
phenomenon has absolutely staggering possibilities to
democratize, to empower people all over the world. It could make
it possible for every child with access to a computer to stretch
a hand across a keyboard, to reach every book every written,
every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed.
The next big step in our economic transformation, it
seems to me, is the full development of this remarkable device
and the electronic commerce it makes possible. One of the things
I have focused on very much lately is with the unemployment rate
at 4.7 percent, and the inflation rate very low and stable, the
question arises from all conventional economic analysis, can we
continue to grow robustly without new inflation. The answer is,
if we're productive enough and we have enough technological
advances, we probably can.
The second this is, can we grow and finally extend
the benefits of this explosion of enterprise to
the isolated communities and people who have not yet felt this
remarkable economic upsurge -- the inner-city neighborhoods, the
remote rural areas. I am convinced that the answer to both those
questions can be yes, if, but only if, we maximize wisely the
potential of our technological revolution.
A new study soon to be released by our working group
on electronic commerce documents the remarkable growth of the
Internet. Within a single year Amazon.com, an on-line bookstore,
increased its sales nearly 10 times selling 6.5 million books in
1997. In a year's time, Internet airline ticket sales nearly
tripled and is expected to grow sixfold, to $5 billion a year, by
the year 2000. By 2002, electronic commerce between businesses
in the United States alone will exceed $300 billion. And, of
course, as with everything on the Internet, that is just the
beginning.
This explosion of real commerce has the potential to
increase our prosperity, to create more jobs, to improve the
lives of our people, and to reach into areas that have not yet
felt prosperity. But it raises new and serious issues as well:
How can we further its growth and foster its magnificent freedom
without allowing it to be used as a tax haven that drains funds
our states and cities need to educate our children and make our
streets safe?
Thirty thousand separate taxing authorities in the
United States -- I'll say that again -- there are 30,000 separate
taxing authorities in the United States -- all struggling to come
to grips with this phenomenon, with only their existing old tax
methods to apply to a very new world. There should be no special
breaks for the Internet, but we can't allow unfair taxation to
weigh it down and stunt the development of the most promising new
economic opportunity in decades.
I think America should adopt a moratorium on
discriminatory taxation so that a bipartisan commission of
elected officials, business leaders, consumers and
representatives of the Treasury Department can carefully study
the matter and come to a resolution. Therefore, I support the
Internet tax freedom act now before Congress, because it takes
into account the rights of consumers, the needs of businesses and
the overall effect of taxation on the development of Internet
commerce. The legislation does not prevent state and local
governments from applying existing taxes to electronic commerce,
as long as there is no discrimination between an Internet
transaction and a traditional one. It does give us time to work
through what is a very, very complex issue.
I'm committed to listening to the concerns of the
governors, the mayors, other officials and businesses, and to
achieve a consensus that will establish rules that are
pro-growth, nondiscriminatory, but will provide appropriate
revenues our communities need to meet vital public purposes. I
think this legislation will have the support of both parties.
And I look forward to working with many of you to pass it and,
along the way, to reach a greater consensus in our nation about
how to go forward from here.
To ensure that electronic commerce can flourish
across international borders, I've also asked the Secretary of
the Treasury to work with our international trading partners to
block new or discriminatory taxes on global electronic commerce.
Already, we've fought off a bit tax, a tax on every unit of data
consumers download from the Internet. And we're working with the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development to prevent
such discrimination and streamline tax administration in
cyberspace.
There are other ways our nation must work to harness
the potential of the Internet. We want to work with you to meet
our goal of connecting every classroom and library in America to
the Internet by the year 2000. Just this morning in Washington,
Vice President Gore announced that we have now connected nearly
80 percent of our schools to the Internet; more than twice as
many as were connected in 1994 when we had the first Net Day here
in California under the leadership of many of you in this room.
He also announced new private and nonprofit efforts to connect
under-served communities to 21st century technology, bringing us
closer to ensuring that a child from the poorest inner city, the
most isolated rural area, or the most affluent suburbs all will
have the same access to the same universe of knowledge in the
same real time.
We want to work with you to make certain that
cyberspace is a healthy place for our children in a way that does
not overregulate the Internet or stifle the growth of electronic
commerce. We will work with you to make sure that consumer
protections and laws that promote competition remain strong in
the new economy at the dawn of the new century, just as we built
competition into the old economy at the turn of the last century.
We will work with you to make sure that the Internet
never becomes a vehicle for tax evasion or money laundering. We
will work with you to build a new Internet that operates up to a
thousand times faster than it does today. My balanced budget
includes $110 million to develop the next generation Internet in
partnership with leading U.S. high-tech companies and
universities. Today, I'm pleased to announce new National
Science Foundation grants that will connect 29 more universities
to help create the next generation Internet, bringing the total
now to 92. And we will work with you in every way we can to lift
our eyes to the remarkable potential of the Internet for
learning, for the arts, as a means to spread our shared values.
The First Lady and I launched the White House
Millennium Program to help our nation honor our past and imagine
our future as we come to this new millennium. In the State of
the Union address I announced a public-private partnership to
preserve our historic treasures for future generations and to
help make them more accessible to more Americans, including the
Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the
Constitution, the Star-Spangled Banner. Putting our treasures on
line will help us to do just that. Our balanced budget will make
3 million objects from the Smithsonian Institution, the National
Archives and other collections available on the Internet by the
year 2000. And together with the private sector we'll help
museums and libraries and communities all around our country to
do the same thing.
Two weeks ago, thanks to Sun Microsystems, we
launched the first ever cybercast from the White House, when
historian Bernard Bailyn from Harvard gave the first in a series
of our Millennium Lectures. We started this special program to
bring some of our greatest thinkers, writers, historians and
scientists to the White House to talk about our nation's history
and our future at this pivotal time. Next week, the world
renowned physicist Stephen Hawking will be with us to talk about
human knowledge in the 21st century, and the innovations it will
create. I hope you will join us on-line at www.WhiteHouse.gov.
(Laughter.) We'll be there. And this time, we will have the
capacity not to shut down like we did last time. (Laughter).
This is a truly exciting time to be an American.
The qualities of the digital revolution, its dynamism, it
curiosity, its flexibility and its drive -- they're at the core
of our character and the legacy of our original revolution. By
once again adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, as
Abraham Lincoln once said, our country is leading the world to
new heights of economic and human development.
I ask you to think about these things together. The
economic development is largely the means by which we seek to
expand the quality of human life not only for the people who
directly participate in it, but for those who benefit indirectly.
As I think more and more about a new century and a
new millennium, I also think more and more about how we began.
All of you are here today committed to an incredible
entrepreneurial way of life and work as the descendants of a
group of people who came here believing that free people would
nearly always get it right. They came fleeing societies where
people like you, with good ideas in the 18th century, were
subject to absolute, arbitrary, abusive government power. And
they forged a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, and a
Bill of Rights based on the simple idea that freedom worked
better and that people ought to be free to pursue happiness
within the context of a more perfect union.
If you look at the whole history of this country,
that's what it has been about. You think about every single
period of change and crisis, whether it was the Civil War or the
Industrial Revolution, the civil rights era, or the present
information age, and the advances have come when we have deepened
the meaning of freedom and expanded it to more people, widened
the circle of opportunity and prosperity, and found a way across
all of our myriad diversities to be a stronger, more united
nation.
That is really what you are a part of, to a degree
that would have been unimaginable to the people who founded this
nation. But I believe it would make them very, very proud.
Thank you for what you do and for what, together, we
will do to make our country stronger in this new era. Thank you
very much. (Applause.)
END 11:47 A.M. PST
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