    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 10, 1993]
    [Pages 1466-1468]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the North Valley Job Training Partnership in Sunnyvale,
    California
    September 10, 1993

        Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President and Madam Mayor and ladies
    and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure for me to be here today. And we
    want to spend most of our time listening to you, but I'd like to take
    just a few minutes to explain what it is we're trying to do with this
    reinventing Government project and how it relates to the future of the
    California economy and the ability of this State to come back.
        When I ran for President it was apparent to me that America had not
    done very well in dealing with all these terrific challenges and changes
    that are sweeping through our world. And you know from your own personal
    life when you're confronted with a change and a challenge, you basically
    have two options: You can kind of hunker down and deny it and pretend
    it's not there and hope it'll go away--and about one time in a hundred
    it will work out all right, and the other 99 times it's not a very
    satisfactory response--or you can take a deep breath and embrace the
    change and determine to make something good happen. And that's what we
    have to do as a country. We have to make change our friend again and not
    our enemy.
        Of all the States in America, the State that's had the toughest time
    lately is California. Your unemployment rate's about 3 percent higher
    than the national average. Because you had 21 percent of the country's
    defense budget, you've taken the lion's share of the defense cuts, not
    only in base closings but costing even more jobs, I would argue,
    contract cutbacks, which have affected people in this part of the State
    in particular. And you've had a lot of other manufacturing job losses
    and other problems. And as a result of that, there have been other kinds
    of pressures forcing the society apart when we need to be coming
    together.
        Now, I believe that in order to remedy that, there are a number of
    things we have to do. We know we've got--the Vice President and I always
    talk about all the deficits we have--we know we've got a budget deficit,
    but if you know anybody who's out of work, you know we've also got an
    investment deficit. And the Government has a performance deficit, which
    means we've got a trust deficit with the people. That is, people want me
    to do things all the time, but they're not sure they trust the Federal
    Government to do it, whatever ``it'' is, because people have worried so
    long.
        So what I would say to you is that if you just look at it from the
    point of view of California, there are certain policies we need to
    change if we're going to generate more jobs and bring people together.
    We know that. We have an economic program, for example, that gives
    people big capital gains incentives now to invest in new high-tech
    companies like those that have generated so many jobs here. We have some
    changes in our economic program which will encourage other kinds of
    investments that will create jobs here. We've got a new defense
    conversion program, and this is an amazing story, where we put out bids
    on about, oh, $475 million of matching funds for people who had ideas to
    convert from defense technologies or convert businesses to domestic
    technologies. We received 2,800 proposals of a total of $8.5 billion,
    and one-quarter of them came from California.
        Now the interesting thing is, one-quarter of all the unemployed
    people in America today live in California. Right? What does that tell
    you? That says there's a big mismatch. You've got all these people with
    ideas and brains and new technologies and ways to create jobs who are
    trying to close that gap. So just in the last 24 hours we have reached
    agreement with the United States Congress to put another $300 million
    into this program, because the demand was

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    so much greater than the supply. It's great.
        Now, so there's the policy aspect. Then there's the whole idea about
    how we from the top down can cut through the bureaucracy. One of the
    things that I did when I became President was to decide I needed to put
    one of my Cabinet members in charge of devising a strategy for
    California. And I asked the Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, to do it.
    And now thankfully he's got a Deputy Secretary who is from Silicon
    Valley, which won't hurt him any in making good decisions.
        And so we thought a lot about what can we do for California. For
    example, by the end of the month we're going to announce a new policy,
    that we probably would not have done this fast if it hadn't been for the
    demands of the people right here in Silicon Valley, to change some of
    the old cold war rules that keep a lot of our high-tech companies from
    selling products overseas to countries that used to be our enemies but
    aren't anymore. So we did that. But we found over and over again that
    even if we had good policies and even if we tried to go around our own
    bureaucracy, until we made a commitment to make this Government work
    better, which means do more, cost less--and both are important--we could
    never really serve you as we ought to.
        And let me just mention that the one specific thing that I want to
    talk about--I have been just overwhelmed by the work that's been done
    here in Sunnyvale basically to continuously provide more services at
    lower cost, but I want to talk just a minute about this job training
    issue. You told me you'd been on the job for 2 years, and you explained
    how your company closed down and moved to another State. That is
    unfortunately going to become a more typical experience for people.
        The average 18-year-old will now change jobs about eight times in a
    lifetime, which means job security does not necessarily mean having the
    same employer. What it means is having the ability to always get a job
    as good or better than the one you've got today, which means that we
    have to make a commitment to the lifetime education and training of
    everybody in our country. And people in our country have to make a
    commitment to be willing to have that lifetime education and training
    into their fifties, into their sixties, as long as they're in the work
    force, because nobody can repeal all of these sweeping changes that are
    going on. We're either going to face them and try to make the most of
    them or hope they'll go away. And like I said, that only works about one
    in a hundred times.
        Now, here's the problem: Your Federal Government is not organized to
    help you very well. The NOVA program works because it is not like the
    way the Federal Government set the job training program up. It works in
    spite of the fact that it gets Federal money, not because of it. I mean,
    that's what you need to know. It works in spite of the fact that it gets
    Federal money.
        Here's how the job training program of your country is organized.
    There are 14 departments spending $24 billion a year on job training,
    which is a pretty good chunk of money, in 150 separate programs. Now, if
    you're unemployed and you need a new training program, you don't give a
    rip which one of those 150 programs you fit into. And a lot of people
    fall between the cracks. The Vice President uncovered this incredible
    story of a person who was working for a company and he lost the job that
    he had because of foreign trade, lower cost competition from overseas.
    So he took another job with the same company instead of just quitting,
    you know, and going on unemployment. And then he lost that job because
    the defense budget was cut. At the time, there was a program to retrain
    people who lost their jobs for foreign trade, but not to retrain people
    who lost their jobs because of defense cuts. So the poor guy was
    punished for going back to work by losing funds to get his training.
    That's crazy.
        So what we're going to try to do through the Secretary of Labor--
    he'll say more about that later--is to merge the unemployment system and
    the job training system, determine immediately who's not likely to get
    that job back or one just like it, and give you access to all the
    training opportunities that the Federal Government is funding. It is
    crazy. You're paying for this out of your pocket. I mean, you're paying
    for $24 billion worth of training, and I'm sure that there's not a
    person here who could name 10, much less 150, of the separate training
    programs available. Am I right? Not only that, you shouldn't have to
    know that. It is irrelevant.
        So the reason we came here is because this NOVA program is what we
    want to do all across the country. Yes, we want to make the Government
    cost less, but if it doesn't work better, you still don't get what you
    need. And the peo-

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    ple who are training who work in this fine company that we just toured
    are examples of what we want to provide for the whole country.
        And I thank you for spending a little time with us today. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:55 p.m. in the courtyard of the Sunnyvale
    Community Center. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Patricia Castillo
    of Sunnyvale.