[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[January 13, 2000]
[Pages 42-45]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Boricua College in Brooklyn, New York
January 13, 2000

    Thank you. You know, I have to tell you, I was sitting here 
listening to all the previous speakers and looking at the people in the 
audience, feeling very grateful for how good Brooklyn's been to me over 
the years, and thinking, you know, this is why I ran for President; 
these are the people that deserve help, a hand up, a chance to work 
together and to live their dreams.
    Enealia Nau, thank you for your wonderful 
words. Thank you for the power of your example. Thank you for the kind 
things you said about my wife, who, I 
should tell you, has been involved, as I was, for now over 15 years in 
these kind of endeavors. We brought a small development bank to our 
State, modeled on the South Shore Bank in Chicago, which did so much to 
revitalize difficult neighborhoods there. We started a microlending 
program, and we're now spreading microlending all across America. And 
last year we made 2 million loans in poor villages in Latin America and 
Africa and Asia, as well, to help people everywhere--[inaudible].
    I always like to come to New York and give my wife a plug. I thought she was going to run for office 
here, but after ``David Letterman'' last 
night, she may be trying to get his job instead. [Laughter] I sat there, 
and I said, ``You know, I thought I was supposed to be the funny one in 
this family.'' [Laughter]
    I want to thank Aida Alvarez for the 
wonderful job she's doing. She's the first Puerto Rican American ever to 
serve in a President's Cabinet, and she's doing quite--[inaudible]. And 
I want to thank our HUD Deputy Secretary, Saul Ramirez, who has already been acknowledged. But

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he and Secretary Cuomo have been real 
champions of economic development here in New York and across the 
country. I thank him.
    President Alicea, thank you for having me 
here. I love to go to community-based educational institutions. I think 
they are in many ways the most successful institutions in America. They 
are entrepreneurial, creative, flexible, and they give everybody a 
chance at the brass ring. And so I thank you.
    I thank Jim King, the State director of 
the Small Business Development Center, and Woodrow McCutchen, the president of the National Association of Small 
Business Development Centers. I want to thank all the people who put up 
the money so far. Thank you, Steve Kravitz, for making this day possible. I want to thank Marge 
Magner and her boss, Sandy Weill, from Citigroup, for donating $100,000 to help 
launch this Boricua Small Business Development Center. I thank ACCION 
and its representative for being here.
    But most of all I want to say a word or two about Nydia 
Velazquez. She has one emotional level--
intense. She communicates one feeling only--passion. [Laughter] When she 
asks you for something, you get the feeling that you can tell her yes 
now or tell her yes later. And in the end, you wind up with 
Enealia's pun on her last name; you decide to go 
for now. [Laughter]
    So she will do anything, I mean 
anything, to get her way. She took a trip with me on Air Force One. She 
gave dancing lessons to a Republican Congressman just to try to get 
him--[inaudible]. He was a very nice, attractive Republican, but being a 
Republican, he had rhythm problems. And she took care of it, you know. 
[Laughter] It was wonderful. I say that because I never want that to 
hurt her in her overwhelmingly Democratic district; she was just trying 
to build more bridges the way she always does. [Laughter]
    It is also true that she was one of 
the first people to say to me, now that we had turned the American 
economy around, we had to reach out to the markets in America that had 
not turned around. And so, for all of you, the most important thing I 
can just say is, thank you, because you have proved that this can work, 
and therefore you have laid a very strong foundation for the legislation 
I'm going to ask Congress to pass this year.
    Let me just say, for example, if you look at the work of the Small 
Business Development Centers in New York State alone--let's just take 
New York State--the 5-year success rate of businesses getting off the 
ground here with the help of these local centers is an astonishing 95 
percent.
    Now, as you have heard, the center that will be here at Boricua 
College is getting a tremendous boost from the New Markets Lending 
Cooperative that Representative Velazquez 
has been so instrumental in creating. This will provide more than $13 
million in loans and venture capital for entrepreneurs like Ms. 
Nau. And many of them would not have access to 
capital in any other way.
    Again, let me say I want to thank ACCION, the Loan Source, Medallion 
Financial Corporation, all of them for their commitments to this 
cooperative. For hundreds of hardworking families in this community, you 
are underwriting the American dream.
    Over the past year, I've been to places that Presidents don't 
normally go. I've been to Watts. I've been to Watts half a dozen times 
since I started running for office, but I went back to Watts. I've been 
to inner-city Newark, inner-city Atlanta, the poorest housing projects 
in Chicago, in East St. Louis, the barrios of south Phoenix and 
Hartford, rural and farming communities in my native State of Arkansas 
and Mississippi and Kentucky. I've been to the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation in South Dakota, where the unemployment rate is 73 percent. 
In every one of these places, and here in Williamsburg, as well, I see 
potential, not hopelessness.
    Now, here's the pitch I try to make when I'm not here to get support 
for many, many more endeavors of this kind. Seven years ago, when I 
started this odyssey as President, we had national economic distress, 
social decline, discredited Government. But today--so we could be 
forgiven for concentrating on the big needs of the majority of the 
American people. We had to turn the ship of state around.
    But now we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest 
welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest 
poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 
years, the first

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back-to-back balanced budgets in 42 years--surpluses. We have, for the 
first time in my lifetime, a strong economy, an improving social fabric, 
and the absence of severe domestic crises or foreign crises. Now, if we 
cannot fulfill our responsibility now to give every American a chance to 
live up to his or her God-given potential, when in the wide world will 
we ever get around to it? If we can't do it now, when will we ever do 
it?
    The second thing I want to do is to amplify a little bit on a point 
that Nydia made, that this is good 
business. A long way from this community in Washington, DC, you would be 
amazed at how many hours we spend with our economic team--and 
Aida has been part of it--and how many hours 
they spend over at the Federal Reserve with Mr. Greenspan, figuring out how can we keep this economic growth going. 
In just a few weeks, this economic expansion will become the longest 
expansion in the history of the country, eclipsing those which occurred 
in wartime when we were fully mobilized. Now, how do you keep it going?
    Well, what normally kills expansion? They run out of steam because 
there is no opportunity to grow, or the growth leads to inflation. And 
then to break inflation, you have to raise interest rates. And that ends 
the economic expansion because people can't afford to borrow any money 
anymore, and they're paying more for what they've already borrowed. And 
they get in trouble, so that ends it.
    Now, is there an inflation-free way to keep the economy going? Yes, 
there is. What is it? You have to find new markets and create new jobs 
and new businesses in places where they didn't exist before. If, at the 
same time, you create new businesses and new employees and new 
consumers, you will have more growth without inflation.
    So in a funny way--you need to know this--what you're doing here is 
good for people in North Dakota where the unemployment rate is under 3 
percent. It's good for people in New Hampshire where the unemployment 
rate is under 3 percent. Why? Because you are permitting them to having 
a growing American economy without inflation.
    So every American should be supporting this, not only because it's 
morally right to give people who are poor and who don't have access to 
capital the chance to live their dreams but because it is in our self-
interest as a nation if we want to keep this astonishing economic 
revival going.
    And more and more people are coming to understand that. I thank the 
Congress on a bipartisan basis for already passing the first bill last 
year appropriating the funding, the first level of funding, for my 
national new markets initiative. Now we're working to pass a set of tax 
incentives and loan guarantees to give companies the same financial 
incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in 
poor areas in Latin America or Africa or Asia.
    I support the incentives we give American businesses and financial 
institutions to invest overseas. Those people are our customers too, and 
they're our partners for the future. And if we want democracy and peace 
and harmony to reign around the world, people need a chance to live 
their dreams, too. It's no accident that the crime rate goes down in 
America when the economy goes up. And the trouble rate goes down around 
the world when the economy goes up. But I do believe that people in 
America deserve to have the same opportunities from their Government, 
and people in America with money deserve to have the same incentives 
from their Government to help Americans that we give them to help people 
in the rest of the world. And that's the basic theory behind the new 
markets initiative.
    An essential component of this is the new markets venture capital 
fund, which your Representative in 
Congress has played such an enormous role in creating. The idea is 
basically simple, but I want to explain it. For every dollar in equity 
capital you invest in America's new markets, we will give another dollar 
in Government-backed loans, effectively doubling the investments. 
Altogether, we think this program that Nydia has helped to create will 
stimulate $1.3 billion over 5 years in new investments to start up and 
expand businesses in areas that have been left behind in urban and rural 
America. And I thank her again for this remarkable thing.
    Now, we still have to pass this. That's why we need her passion and focus, you see. [Laughter] And it is a 
great testament to the efforts that she and others have made that not 
very long ago we had a big new markets event in Chicago, and the Speaker 
of the House, who is from Illinois, joined 
us there--just a couple of months ago. He made it clear that he is

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ready to work with us to come to agreement on legislation early this 
year. And I talked to him a few days ago; he reaffirmed that commitment. 
If we do get this kind of bipartisan agreement, I don't want you to 
forget that Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez will be a major reason why we 
get this done.
    Let me just close with this. Think about where we are now, as 
opposed to where we were 100 years ago, right here. At the turn of the 
last century, Williamsburg was known as one of the best incubators of 
new businesses anywhere in America. It was positioned near a big port 
and a major market. The waterfront was packed with docks, shipyards, 
warehouses, metal works, sugar refineries, and mills. After World War 
II, everything changed.
    Today you've heard your unemployment rate, your poverty rate, and 
your rate of homeownership are more than twice the national average in 
the wrong direction. But the people here represent a whole new wave of 
American immigrants, more than 90 ethnic groups represented within just 
a mile or so of where we are. And Williamsburg once again is becoming a 
remarkable incubator, from retailers and restaurants to bodegas and 
bookshops. And the economy is changing.
    We had a huge wave of immigrants who came into New York City 100 
years ago from all over the world, just as people began to move from 
rural areas in America to the city, because the economy changed from an 
agricultural economy to an industrial economy. And America was changing 
with it, and people saw hope. Well, the economy has changed again. And 
for 30 years, Brooklyn bore the brunt of it, as the industrial economy 
shrank, particularly in the number of employees it took to produce 
things and manufacture them, and we developed a new information-based 
economy in an increasingly globalized society.
    But we're hooking into that now with things like information 
services. There's a tremendous opportunity out there for people who will 
help do what lawyer Nau is doing--now. 
[Laughter] And this represents a clear understanding that most of the 
job growth is coming in America from small businesses. And most people 
who start small businesses have a good idea of what they want to do, but 
they may not know how to do it, or all the other stuff you've got to do 
just to do what you want to do and what you're trained and skilled to 
do.
    So this is a big part of America continuing its growth and using, 
literally, the only chance in my lifetime, which is getting a little 
longer as the days go by, the only chance in my lifetime we have ever 
had to give every American who is willing to work the chance to live the 
American dream.
    So I want to say again how profoundly grateful I am to all of you, 
to say thank you, and Dios los bendiga. Bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:55 a.m. in the third floor atrium at the 
college. In his remarks, he referred to Enealia Nau, Brooklyn business 
owner, who introduced the President; Victor Alicea, president, Boricua 
College; Steven D. Kravitz, president, Loan Source, Inc.; Marge Magner, 
Primerica Financial Services and Citibanking North America executive; 
Sanford I. Weill, chief executive officer, Citigroup; Terri Ludwig, 
president and chief executive officer of ACCION; and late night 
television talk show host David Letterman.