Clinton Targets Billions for High-Tech Projects : Spending: Policy includes tax breaks for industries. President also promises help for ailing aircraft makers.

President Clinton, in a visit Monday to California’s Silicon Valley and the beleaguered Boeing Co. here, announced a new technology policy designed to channel billions of dollars of federal spending into futuristic projects.

The President also promised to help the troubled aircraft industry and pleaded for support for his economic package of tax increases and spending cuts.

In a morning event that offered a dramatic contrast to a more somber afternoon session at Boeing, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore stopped in Mountain View, Calif., to visit employees of Silicon Graphics a fast-growing high technology firm that specializes in state-of-the-art computer graphics.

Clinton and Gore used the occasion to introduce the Administration’s new technology policy, which targets government spending and tax breaks to a variety of emerging technologies and industries.

All told, the initiative would provide $17 billion in new spending over the next four years on projects ranging from a non-polluting automobile to a national computer “superhighway.” The Administration also proposes nearly $6.5 billion in tax credits for companies that invest in research and experimentation.

Many of the projects already are in existence and Clinton is merely proposing to increase funding for them. The announcement Monday was an attempt to follow through on promises he made during the campaign in a successful bid for the support of the leaders of the computer and other high-technology industries.

White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said the technology package was chiefly an effort to “pull together the various initiatives in the economic plan that relate to technology.” She said all the provisions were contained in the $169 billion in new spending announced in last week’s economic program but that they were repackaged for Monday’s announcement.

Later, in a stop at the Boeing Co.’s huge assembly plant, the President commiserated with employees of the firm, which last week announced the layoffs of 28,000 employees, a fifth of its total workforce. He all but blamed the massive job loss on the Europeans, whose government-subsidized Airbus Industrie consortium is undercutting Boeing in the international marketplace.

Standing in a vast aircraft assembly building before the unfinished shell of a 747 jetliner, the President told 3,000 Boeing employees that the United States had come “dangerously close” to abandoning its aircraft industry by failing to halt the European support of Airbus.

“A lot of these layoffs would not have been announced had it not been for the $26 billion that the United States sat by and let Europe plow into Airbus over the past several years,” Clinton said.

Saying that he would strive to terminate such subsidies, the President then launched into a sales pitch for his economic plan, which he said would help create jobs in emerging industries by supporting technological innovation.

Clinton said at a press conference after the Boeing appearance that the United States had made “a huge mistake” in allowing the Airbus subsidies to occur without responding.

In making the remarks, Clinton clearly was rattling the saber of protectionism in an area that has been hard hit by what he characterized as the unfair trading practices of America’s major competitors.

“We need a different trade policy,” Clinton said. “Our goal must still be to expand trade. But we no longer have the luxury . . . of being the only country in the world that can ignore certain problems in terms of trade fairness that other countries don’t ignore.”

He added, in a clear warning to major trading partners in Europe and Asia: “We may have a firmer trade policy in some respects than we’ve had in the past.”

Clinton received a polite but reserved reception from the plant workers, and his appearance seemed to do little to dispel the gloom that has descended upon the ailing company. Clinton noted that the U.S. aircraft manufacturers and commercial airlines had lost more money in the last three years than they had earned in profits in their previous histories.

Clinton then met privately with the chief executives of the major U.S. airlines--which collectively lost $8 billion in 1992--to hear how government might be able to improve their competitive prospects. Many industry leaders have complained that the higher corporate tax rates and the fuel taxes included in Clinton’s economic plan could be fatal for several weaker airlines.

Joining Clinton in the session was Transportation Secretary Federico Pena. The Administration is forming a 15-member commission to look into ways to revitalize the industry.

In the decidedly more upbeat episode at Silicon Graphics, where he addressed about 300 employees in the company cafeteria, Clinton was shown the firm’s latest products and graphics techniques. The President was awed by a moving three-dimensional computer model of the intersection of Normandie and Vermont avenues in Los Angeles, which allowed the operator to travel through the neighborhood and view it from various angles.

A company official explained the simulation could be used by community planners and neighborhood residents to decide where to locate projects or how to improve traffic flow.

Workers then demonstrated computer modeling of population growth in Arkansas and the use of graphics to train aircraft maintenance workers.

“Wow,” the President said.

With Gore sitting beside him, Clinton joked with the Silicon Graphics workers that his vice president had once waxed poetic about the “gestalt of the gigabit,” mixing his psychoanalytic and computer metaphors.

“What other national office-holder in your lifetime did you hear say anything like that?” Clinton laughed.

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