    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 8, 1999]
    [Pages 1166-1169]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in a Discussion on Youth Opportunities in Los Angeles,
    California
    July 8, 1999

        The President. Thank you. Please sit down. We're running behind now.
    I've got to get to be more businesslike. Since Alexis has been so fulsome in her kind comments, that was an
    example of Clinton's second law of politics: Always be introduced by
    someone you've appointed to a high position. [Laughter]
        Let me say to, first, our host here in Representative Maxine
    Waters' district, we're delighted to be here.
    I want to thank all of you who made it possible for us to come to this
    beautiful facility. Let me say I am doing something today I never
    thought I would ever do, for those who have been on the tour with me; I
    came to Los Angeles to cool off. [Laughter] It was 100 degrees in
    Washington when we left; it was 100 degrees in Appalachia; it was 100
    degrees in the Mississippi Delta; it was 100 degrees in East St. Louis;
    it was only about 94 on the Indian reservation yesterday; and it was
    over 100 in south Phoenix. So I came to Los Angeles to cool off, and I
    thank you very much for that.
        I want to thank Secretary Daley and
    Secretary Slater who are here; and Reverend
    Jackson, thank you for making this tour with
    us and all the business leaders who have been with us. I want to thank
    Congresswoman Millender-McDonald.
    We were just over at the transportation academy in her district, and I
    enjoyed that very much. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, thank you for being here. Congressman Xavier
    Becerra; and Congressman Paul
    Kanjorski, who came all the way from
    Pennsylvania, has been on every step of this tour, and I thank him.
        Governor, thank you for making us feel
    welcome, and Yvonne Burke, thank
    you, and I'd like to thank all the business leaders and all the leaders
    from entertainment and athletics and other things that are here today.

    [[Page 1167]]

        I will be very brief because I want to hear from the young people
    here. I have believed from the beginning of my tenure as President that,
    in order for the American economy to really work and in order for the
    American society to work, every American should believe that he or she
    had a chance to be a part of it. And we've worked on this for some time.
    And you heard Alexis talking about the economic statistics: we now have
    the longest peacetime expansion in history, the lowest minority
    unemployment rates ever recorded. But everyone knows that there are
    still substantial numbers of people in our distressed urban and rural
    areas and on our Indian reservations that basically have not been part
    of this recovery.
        In Watts, for example, the unemployment rate has dropped by almost
    50 percent but is still three times above the national average, just for
    example. And so it seemed to me, several months ago--and I talked about
    this in my State of the Union Address way back in January--that there
    was a way to tap the enormous feeling that a lot of our business leaders
    have that they've done very, very well in a stock market that's more
    than tripled in 6 years and a strong economy and that they ought to give
    something back with the idea that it would actually be good economics to
    give something back.
        Those of you who follow the business news know that, every time the
    Federal Reserve meets, there's all this tense speculation: Will they
    raise interest rates or not? Well, what does that mean to these young
    people here with their yellow T-shirts on? It is that most economists
    believe that there is a limit to how low the unemployment can go and a
    limit to how high the economic growth can go, before you have so much
    inflation that you have to stop it, which kills the economic recovery.
        Now, how can you keep it going? How can we keep this recovery going,
    never mind all these kids we're here to hear about, just for those of
    you who have done well in the stock market? How could you keep it going?
    The easiest way to keep it going is to go to places where there aren't
    enough jobs and there aren't enough consumers, and create more of both:
    create more business owners, create more workers, create more consumers.
    That's all growth completely without inflation.
        It allows America's economic expansion to continue, so there's a
    real sense in which, every time we hire a young person off the street in
    Watts and give him or her a better future, we are helping people who
    live in the ritziest suburbs in America to continue to enjoy a rising
    stock market, and it proves beyond any doubt that we are all in this
    together, that we're all better off when the least of us do well.
        And also, we have a chance here that we've never had before, at
    least in my lifetime, certainly not since the American economy began to
    unravel in the late sixties. We have got a chance to actually build an
    economic infrastructure in the inner cities and in rural America that
    will restore something like a normal economy to places.
        There will always be--some times are pretty good; some times won't
    be so good. But what we want for every American is to live in a
    community where at least he or she has the same shot everybody else
    does.
        Now, the first 3\1/2\ days, what we spent focusing on is how to get
    money into isolated places. That's basically what we've been focusing
    on. And we talked a lot about the things we've been doing since 1993.
    We've had wonderful business leaders from all over America, by the way,
    of both parties--this is not a partisan issue anyplace but Washington,
    DC, and I hope it won't be there--saying, ``Hey, this is good business.
    This is a good deal. We want to be a part of it.'' And we talked about
    this new markets legislation I have proposed which would give tax
    credits and government-guaranteed loans to people who would invest to
    give equity to people to start businesses in the inner city and in rural
    America.
        And basically what I've asked the Congress to do is to give
    businesspeople the same incentive to invest in America they get to
    invest today in poor communities in Latin America or Asia or Africa or
    the Caribbean. I don't want to take those opportunities away. I just
    want American communities to have the same shot at the future.
        So now, what we're here today to say is that, even if we do all
    that, in the world we're living in, there is a high premium in an
    information society placed on knowledge, skills, what you know today,
    and what you can continue to learn. One of the young people I saw today
    is about to join the United States Army, once in a gang, was working a
    computer program in which he was able to match someone in Russia who
    wanted to buy tires with someone in Colombia who

    [[Page 1168]]

    wanted to sell them, and he could get a commission off of it in between.
    Well, I just give you that as one example. I saw a lot of other--I saw
    two young people who were designing automobiles that would be less wind-
    resistant and, therefore, would operate at higher rates of efficiency.
        Another young man who was mixing sound, so that if I--he told me, if
    I sang a song flat into his microphone, he could tune it up so I'd sound
    just fine. [Laughter]
        All these things make this point, and that's why we're here, to
    finish, in a way, with the most important thing of all: We can put in
    place the financial networks; we can create a lot of jobs; but our young
    people--and 60 percent of the young people, men and women, young men and
    women in the most distressed areas of America are neither in school or
    at work still. And so we can do all of these things and provide these
    investments, but if our young people don't have the opportunity to learn
    and to continue to learn and to continue to get training for a lifetime,
    we won't be able to do it.
        The first place I went in Appalachia, 57 percent of the people who
    live there never finished high school. It's very remote. But there's a
    man there that expanded a firm that does business with all the high-tech
    companies in the country from 40 to 850 employees by having all of his
    present employees do a continuous job training on every new person they
    try to take out of the hills and hollows of Appalachia.
        So there is no place, even in rural America, that can escape the
    reality that we must train and educate our young people if we really
    want this to work. So that's what we're here about.
        I thank Secretary Herman for this youth
    opportunities initiative, and all of you who are participating. So
    Alexis, why don't you take over, and let's hear from our folks.

    [At this point, the discussion began.]

        The President. Let me just say, Mel Farr, who
    is a former all-pro football player from Detroit, is becoming the
    largest automobile dealer in America, and it's just worked out. One of
    the announcements we made earlier on our tour is that he has a lot of
    big financial institutions who've agreed to buy his car loans in bulk,
    which will enable him to expand all across America and put minority-
    owned dealerships in every community in this country.
        And for people who have modest incomes, you know, he has adapted this sort of car leasing proposal; you
    remember, this started a few years ago when people stopped buying cars
    and started leasing them and leased them 3 years. Mel will lease people
    cars, give you leases for as short a period as 2 months. But if you
    don't pay, you can't make off with the car; he's got a device that will
    turn the car off. [Laughter] So he soon will be responsible for the
    widest distribution of car ownership in America with the largest number
    of cars that won't run. [Laughter]
        This is actually a brilliant thing, because he's giving people a chance to have cars they never could
    afford otherwise. He's recognizing that people who don't have a lot of
    cash income have to live from month to month; and he's doing it in a way
    that is giving people a chance to run dealerships who never could have
    run them before, and they will all train people and hire the kind of
    people that Toyota center is training.
        So thank you, Mel, for a brilliant thing you're
    doing.

    [The discussion continued.]

        The President. Thank you. Let me just briefly say in closing, first
    of all, I want to thank all those who have participated and those who
    are here who have not said anything but, by the power of their example,
    are doing a great thing for our country. We have advocates here; we have
    investors; and we have those who are examples, particularly these young
    people who have spoken.
        To me, this is the best of all endeavors because it is the morally
    right thing to do and it is in the self-interest of every American who
    participates in it. I believe--I listened to these young people, and I
    read the notes on their lives before I came here. You know, things
    happen to people in life, and the good things and the bad things,
    especially to our children, are not evenly distributed. And yet, among
    all the poor people in America, there are people who could help us find
    a cure for AIDS, a vaccine; there are people who could help us to--I
    talked to one of the young men earlier who developed composite parts for
    cars that would be as strong as steel and weigh a thousand pounds less
    and get 80 miles a gallon, or 90. There are people who could solve every
    problem out there. The

    [[Page 1169]]

    talent and the human spirit are evenly distributed across racial and
    income lines.
        But things happen to people, and things happen to communities. In
    our inner cities and a lot of our rural areas, the economic bases that
    once made them organized, thriving, and successful evaporated, and we
    did a lousy job as a country of replacing that. We were slow off the
    uptake. And in other places, like our Indian reservations, arguably,
    there never was an economic basis that would be self-sustaining.
        So what we do here is to say that this is not something the
    Government can do alone, but the Government should do its part. And this
    is not something the private sector can be expected to do unless we
    provide the training and the support for the young people and provide
    the framework within which we lower the risk of these investments as
    much as is prudent.
        But we have to remember the human element in all this. We were in
    East St. Louis yesterday, visited a Wal-Mart store in one of the most
    distressed inner-city areas--I mean, Walgreens store, this beautiful
    Walgreens store--30 employees. The manager of the Walgreens
    store was a 24-year-old African-American girl
    that grew up in that community and got out of college and was just good
    at what she did, and that company believed in her enough to give her a
    chance at the age of 24 to run a store with 30 employees. An example.
    You're an example. You're an example. You're an example. All of you are
    examples.
        The rest of us, who basically had a lot of luck and good fortune in
    life--you know, we all like to believe we were born in log cabins we
    built ourselves, but most of us were helped along life's way and we had
    a lot of luck to get where we are, and most of us, with all the bad
    things that happened to us, end life ahead of where we would be if all
    we got was what we just deserved. And we should remember that.
        And we should think about these children and remember that it is in
    the interest of America--the talent and the gifts and the richness of
    their souls and their spirits are evenly distributed. But things happen
    to them or things happen to the place where they happen to be born or
    where they happen to live now, and we can make it better. If we can't do
    it now, with this economy as strong as it is, we'll never get around to
    doing it.
        So when we leave here, we should remember that, and we should do it.
    Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at noon in the Founders' Library at Southwest
    College. In his remarks, he referred to civil rights leader Jesse
    Jackson; Gov. Gray Davis of California; Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Los
    Angeles County supervisor, second district; and Walgreens manager Angela
    Tennon.