Back to Work - Bill Clinton [18]
So is the idea that there’s no such thing as a good program or a bad program cut. For example, in 1995, the Social Security Administration (SSA), in an independent study by Dalbar Inc., was rated as having the best telephone customer service among a group of world-class companies, including FedEx, L.L.Bean, Southwest Airlines, and Disney. In 2000, SSA received recognition for its innovative and sophisticated customer service approach from CIO magazine as a CIO 100 honoree, the only major federal agency on the list, along with major corporations like Amazon.com, Intel, Ford Motor Company, and Marriott International. In 2011, the Veterans Administration (VA) became the first hospital system in the nation to order and implement simple, uniform sterilization procedures to prevent hospital infections, which cause tens of thousands of deaths and add tens of billions of dollars to our health-care costs every year. Though there have been a few cases of infection in VA hospitals caused by equipment not properly sterilized, the rate of infections has been reduced dramatically. Medicare and Medicaid have far lower administrative costs than private insurance companies. Led by for-profit insurance companies, our health-care system spends about eleven cents on the dollar more on paperwork and administration than any other wealthy nation. That’s more than $200 billion a year.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was roundly criticized after Katrina, was probably the most popular department in the federal government during my administration because the director, James Lee Witt, had a strong background in emergency management, put together a first-rate professional staff, and instilled an ethic of speed, service, and compassion up and down the line. Ron Brown was a very highly regarded commerce secretary because he supported companies’ efforts to become more productive, recognized them for doing so, and devoted the resources of his department to helping them sell more American-made products around the world. Mickey Kantor and Charlene Barshefsky were good trade representatives because they negotiated and implemented a total of three hundred new trade agreements and supported strong enforcement of the provisions of those agreements that protect American economic interests. As secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt was widely praised for protecting irreplaceable areas and operating a national park system that has been emulated by nations all over the world. Government doesn’t always mess everything up. It can be worth what you pay for it.
To get America back into the future business, we’ll have to make choices and changes in both our government and our private economic practices. To create jobs and raise incomes; to create new businesses and restore our manufacturing base; to have a finance sector that both earns money for itself and promotes a strong economy; to save ourselves and our children from the ravages of climate change in a way that increases growth and broadens prosperity; to move back to a balanced budget—these tasks will require the best ideas of conservatives, liberals, and moderates, Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
But we can’t get the right answers if we begin with the wrong question. How can we weaken our government, reduce its revenues, and restrict its reach so we can throw off its chains? That’s the wrong question. We’ve been asking it too long.
Here are the right questions: How can we move back to a full-employment economy with good jobs and rising middle-class incomes? How can we restore American leadership for peace and prosperity and leave our children and grandchildren a brighter future? What do Americans need government to do to achieve these goals? How are we doing now, compared with our own history and expectations? How are we doing compared with the competition from other nations? As you’ll see, there