[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[February 18, 1997]
[Pages 166-169]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Business Enterprise Awards Luncheon in New York City
February 18, 1997

    Thank you very much, Jim and Norman, and to all of you who are 
involved in the Business Enterprise Trust; our host, the New York Public 
Library, thank you for this magnificent room; and to--especially to our 
awardees.
    I'm glad Bill Moyers told that story about Calvin Coolidge and Alice 
Roosevelt Longworth because I was looking at these--I had a great time 
today. I sort of hate it that I have to speak; I was having such a good 
time looking at the films and looking at the people. But I was thinking 
to myself, why am I here, because this is such an interesting program; 
what do they need me here for? And then I thought, well, Norman Lear has 
been trying to get me to come here for 4 years. [Laughter] He's hard to 
say no to. Every person's friendship carries a certain burden; you know 
that. That's it. [Laughter] And as Calvin Coolidge said, ``A man's got 
to eat.'' [Laughter] So, Norman, I want to thank you for that stick of 
bread and the cookie at lunch. It was great. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, Norman Lear told that old story about his 
grandfather; in 1981, I had the distinction of entering my name for the 
first time in Ripley's when I became the youngest former Governor in the 
history of the American Republic. [Laughter] With dim career prospects--
and in my entire State only one person offered me a job--Norman Lear 
called me and asked me if I would consider coming to work in another one 
of his endeavors. And I never forgot it, mostly because no one else 
wanted me to come to work at anything. [Laughter] And we've been friends 
ever since. He doesn't have to do this. He does it because he believes 
in it and he loves it and he believes that all of us have a higher 
purpose in our endeavors.
    I have known Jim Burke for a long time. In his former life, he 
headed a great company with two plants in my State that were the 
embodiment of a lot of what you recognize here every year. And since 
then, he has headed the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I don't

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think any American citizen could wish to have a person in charge of the 
endeavor to make our country drug-free who is deeper, more committed, 
more passionate, more whole-hearted than Jim Burke. America owes him an 
enormous debt of gratitude for his efforts there.
    I was thinking about what all this meant today in terms of what I 
actually need to talk to you about as President. What does Marriott's 
efforts to provide real services to many of their employees, including a 
lot of them whose first language is not English and who weren't born 
here--what does that mean for what I have to say? What does Motorola's 
commitment to lifetime education and training for its employees--
something we do in the military, I might add, but something which 
Motorola does at an investment of 3 times the industry average--what 
does that mean? What does the incredible story of Olmec Toys mean? If I 
ever need anything sold, I'm calling you. [Laughter] I've now run all my 
elections; where were you when I needed you? [Laughter] What does it 
mean for children to be able to see in their toys their dreams, and 
imagine that there is a connection between their small lives and their 
big dreams?
    I don't know how many of you read Max DePree's books, but I have, 
and when I read ``Leadership Is An Art'' I was overwhelmed. I said to 
myself, why in the living daylights didn't I know that already? Why 
haven't I been doing that? Why would anybody ever try to do it any other 
way? What does all this mean?
    What I think it means is not only that it's possible to be a good 
business person and a good citizen, that it's possible to do things like 
grow the economy and preserve the environment, that you can make a 
profit and still be decent to your employees, that you can be efficient 
and still recognize the dignity and the importance of the larger society 
of which you're a part--that's all true--but I think what it really 
means is that the most fulfilled people in life are those whose lives 
are most whole and most in harmony with others with whom they live and 
come in contact and work, and that in a funny way we're all trying, in 
different ways, to end the isolation of our endeavors and find some real 
integrity, some wholeness to them, to connect ourselves to each other in 
a way that enables us to flourish as individuals and to find personal 
success by making the whole stronger and better.
    And that brings me to what I actually need to talk to you about 
today, which is how we're going to do that for those among us who are 
the poorest Americans, who are on welfare and who are now the object of 
the welfare reform law which I signed last year, because they, too, 
deserve that. And in some ways, those who have become permanently 
dependent on public assistance have been isolated from the rest of us by 
people whose political views span the entire spectrum.
    I hear people who think of themselves as conservative, demeaning 
people on welfare sometimes by saying, ``Well, none of them want to go 
to work,'' and you know, ``The only answer to that is just to walk away. 
They won't do anything unless they're faced with starvation.'' And then 
I hear people who are more liberal, demeaning them in a way that can be 
equally deadening by saying, ``Well, the poor things, they can't work, 
and so we have to just take care of them. Of course, we'll take care of 
them at a substandard level, so that every month, from now to the rest 
of their lives, they'll always be acutely conscious of what they cannot 
do and cannot be and cannot become.''
    I believe that we never intended to create a class of permanently 
dependent people in our society. I believe it only happened because the 
welfare system we set up for people who had genuine misfortune--the 
typical welfare recipient 60 years ago was a West Virginia miner's widow 
with no education and no expectation of being in the work force and 
children running around the house that had to be cared for and a society 
that did not require high levels of education for success.
    Today, basically, there are two groups of people on welfare. Half 
the people in this system or any other system would work just fine for 
it because they run into a little trouble and then they need a little 
help. But they get themselves out of it, and they go right on about 
their business and don't get back on welfare again. And they do just 
fine. And this system--it's not very good, but it's about as good as 
anything else because they made it work and they go on with their lives.
    Then there are the rest of the people on welfare, slightly more than 
half, who essentially have become part of a group of people in America 
known in a kind of pejorative sense often as a permanent underclass, 
mostly younger women and their young children with little or

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no education, little or no job experience, little or no ability to move 
into the work force on a sustained basis.
    There are another group of people, by the way, that have not been 
part of this public debate at all, who are at least as big a social 
concern to me, and those are the single men who are ineligible to get 
welfare payments in almost every State because they're single men, they 
don't have children they're supporting, and they live on food stamps and 
whatever else they can scrounge up. But they're hardly ever in the work 
force, and we have paid for that as well. The isolation of these people 
from the rest of us has cost them in ways that are obvious, but we have 
paid as well--all the families that haven't been formed, all the jobs 
and all the economic activity that hasn't been there.
    So for 4 years, we've been working on this because I believe we 
could do better. And in 4 years, we've had the biggest reduction in 
welfare rolls in history, 2\1/4\ million. But it happened for several 
reasons. It happened about half because we had 11\1/2\ million jobs in 
the last 4 years, and that had never happened before. It happened about 
30 percent because over 40 States were already working on welfare 
reform, moving people from welfare to work. And we don't really know why 
the other 20 percent got off welfare, partly because we had a 50 percent 
increase in child support collections.
    But now we have a law that says every State must design a system to 
move able-bodied people who are adults from welfare to work in 2 years. 
That's what the law says. And I won't bore you with all the details, but 
let me give you the bottom line. The bottom line is that in the next 4 
years, with a smaller welfare population and people who are therefore 
harder to place, we have to move as many people into the work force as 
we did in the last 4 years when we had 11\1/2\ million jobs and a 50 
percent increase in child support enforcement and 43 States already out 
there working on welfare reform.
    And you have to help. And you have to find a way to make it good 
business. And I believe you can. And that's what I came here to say. We 
cannot be the country we ought to be if 20 percent of our children are 
living in poverty. We cannot be the country we ought to be if we say 
there are all these folks out here that literally we're prepared to have 
physically separate from us. And if any of you have ever really spent 
any time with folks on welfare, you know that most of them are actually 
dying to go to work. And a painful number literally don't know the first 
thing about how. And we have a lot of work to do.
    But what I want to say to you is this is not an insurmountable 
problem. Let me just give you a couple of numbers. Keep in mind I said 
in order to meet the requirements of the law, which I have carefully 
reviewed now, we'll have to move about a million people more into the 
work force. That will reduce the welfare rolls by about 2.7 million 
because of the size of welfare families.
    Now, how in the wide world are we going to do this? Well, the first 
thing you need to know is that there are about 826,000 businesses in 
America with more than 20 employees. There are 1.1 million nonprofit 
organizations in America--I don't have the employment breakdown on them. 
There are 135,000 houses of worship in America with 200 or more members, 
and over 200,000 with 100 or more members.
    Under the new law, every State in the country can take what used to 
be the welfare check and actually just go give it to an employer to 
train--properly train, not have some momentary, fly-by-night, 
meaningless education program but to actually properly train the 
employee--and to pay a wage subsidy to help train people on literally 
the habits of work. There is no excuse not to do that. If the law passes 
that I have proposed, we'll also have a 50 percent tax credit of up to 
$10,000 for doing it.
    Every State can--for single men who don't get welfare checks--can 
give food stamp funds to the employer for the same purpose. The tax 
credits are no good to the houses of worship and the community 
nonprofits who don't pay taxes, but the cash subsidies would be. There 
are all kinds of things that can be done. But if you just look at the 
sheer numbers of employers out there, we could do this million people in 
a snap and help to break the back of the isolated underclass in America 
and make poverty what it used to be, at least in our imagination, which 
is a way-station on the way to the middle class for people who would 
work and learn.
    Over the weekend, Charlene Barshefsky, our Trade Ambassador, 
concluded an agreement on telecommunications that industry leaders 
estimate will bring one million new jobs to America--that one 
agreement--in the next 10 years. But none of them will go to people who 
are

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illiterate. None of them will go to people who can't find their way on a 
bus or a subway to work. None of them will go to people who literally 
don't have the self-confidence to be able to look people dead in the eye 
and talk to them and relate to them.
    This country will never be what it ought to be if there are people 
who are literally beyond the message of Max DePree or Motorola or Olmec 
Toys or all these other things. We have got to realize, especially 
because so many of them are children, that they are our responsibility, 
too.
    And so I ask you today, whether you belong in the category of folks 
who've criticized the welfare system without really knowing anybody on 
welfare, or whether you belong in a category of folks who patronize 
people on welfare and therefore undersold what they could become, or 
whether, like most of us, you've probably done a little bit of both in 
your life, they are our people. They are a big part of our future.
    The law now says that those who can work have to work. And now that 
we, as a nation, have put that requirement on them, we have to make sure 
that those who have to work can work. It is our highest responsibility. 
But we should do it not with any spirit other than a desire to further 
what we saw in every one of these films today and to make sure every 
American can be a part of the whole. And if that happens, they will be 
better, but so will we.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:42 p.m. at the New York Public Library. 
In his remarks, he referred to Jim Burke, chairman, and Norman Lear, 
founder, Business Enterprise Trust; and journalist Bill Moyers.