[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[February 23, 2000]
[Pages 292-294]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks Announcing Budget Initiatives on Transportation for Working 
Families
February 23, 2000

    Thank you very much. Let's give him a 
hand. [Applause] There you go. Wasn't he great? Thank you very much, 
Michael. We all know you don't do this public speaking for a living, and 
you did a terrific job. You may have a few more job interviews after the 
day is over. [Laughter] For those of you who don't know, Brocton, New 
York, is near Buffalo. So if this message goes out there to western New 
York, Michael is looking for a good job. [Laughter] And if he takes one, 
there are a lot of other people who are, too, out there.
    I want to thank Secretary Glickman for 
being here and for his support of this endeavor. I want to thank our 
Deputy Secretary of the Department of Transportation, Mort 
Downey, for their work, he and Secretary 
Slater. And I want to say a special word of 
welcome to Senator Arlen Specter from 
Pennsylvania, who has kept our welfare-to-work policy completely 
bipartisan, and I thank you, sir, for what you've done, and I'm glad 
you're here.
    I grew up with and served as a Governor for a lot of people like 
Michael Alexander. In my term of service 
in Arkansas we had, depending on what census it was, somewhere between 5 
and 10 of the poorest counties in America. Some were in the Mississippi 
Delta, and they were predominantly African-American. Some were in the 
Arkansas Ozarks; they were overwhelmingly white. They were all full--
they were all rural counties, and they were all full of people who lived 
in little places and had to go to bigger places to work. They all wanted 
to work, and they all wanted to do right by their kids.
    And I saw this young man up here 
speaking, and I'm thinking about what it must be like to be his age with 
his whole life still before him, two little kids under foot, trying to 
figure out how to do right by them. Somebody like that shouldn't have to 
worry about whether they can go out and get in the car, whether the car 
will start, and if they get in a car, whether they won't be able to get 
food for their children. That's what this is all about.
    And what I want you to know is, there are lots of Michael Alexanders 
out there in America. They're from all backgrounds, all races, all 
faiths. And for those of us who grew up in places where a lot of Michael 
Alexanders live, we know that but for a bump in the road, a lot of 
others of us could be in the same fix they're in. That's what this is 
all about.
    We have worked very hard for 7 years now, based on a vision I had in 
1992 that everybody that was responsible enough to work for it ought to 
have a shot at the American dream. And a lot more people do today, for 
the reasons that Secretary Glickman said. The Congress has helped us not 
just by getting rid of the deficit and getting interest rates down and 
getting investment up but also trying to make work pay.
    That's what the earned-income tax credit's all about. And I hope 
Congress will expand it again by trying to make sure that especially 
parents in his position can, under family leave, more of them can take a 
little time off without losing their jobs if their children are in 
trouble or their parents are sick. And I think we ought to expand the 
law to cover regular visits to schools, too. You heard Michael mention 
that.
    And it's working, all right. And it's working--the poverty rate is 
way down, lowest in 20 years, lowest Hispanic poverty rate in 20 years, 
lowest African-American poverty rate ever recorded, since we've been 
keeping separate statistics for about 30 years now. But there are still 
a lot of people who are responsible enough to work and go to school, who 
are not being rewarded with a chance to succeed at work, at school, and 
raising their kids, and work themselves into a middle class lifestyle. 
And as you just heard in graphic terms, one of the biggest barriers 
today is transportation and not, interestingly enough, not just for 
people living in small towns

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like Brocton but also increasingly for people living in inner cities.
    Why? Because two-thirds of all the new jobs are now being created in 
suburbs, which means if you're living in the inner city or in a small 
town, you're someplace different from where the jobs are. And if you're 
living in a city with perfectly wonderful public transportation, 9 times 
out of 10 it doesn't run to the suburbs. So even if you have access to 
public transportation, it probably doesn't take you to where the jobs 
are.
    Three-quarters of all the Americans who get public assistance live 
in central cities or rural areas; two-thirds of the new jobs are in the 
suburbs. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that transportation is 
critical to matching the available work force with the available jobs.
    Now consider this, just for example. A low wage job seeker living in 
Watts in Los Angeles who has a car can get to 57 times more jobs than a 
person living in Watts who does not have a car and has to depend on 
public transportation.
    Nationwide, low income families with cars are 25 percent more likely 
to work than those without cars. If you want more people to work, you've 
got to help them get to work. The first step is to eliminate the 
roadblocks that keep them from getting or keeping a car. Among the most 
senseless of them are food stamp rules that force low income families to 
choose between the food they need for their children and the car they 
need to work. No family should have to make that choice. And today I 
want to take some action to help make sure fewer do.
    Under current rules, a family that makes a few-hundred-dollar 
downpayment on a car immediately can become ineligible for food stamps, 
even though it's the bank, not the family, that owns the car. Today we 
are releasing a new regulation that will allow families with as much as 
$1,000 of equity in a car to keep the car and remain eligible for food 
stamps. That will help 150,000 people like Michael have a car for work and still have food stamps for 
their kids--150,000.
    Another roadblock in the law says you're ineligible for food stamps 
if the car you own, as Secretary Glickman said, is worth more than 
$4,650, a limit set by Congress over 20 years ago. Since then, the price 
of the average car has tripled. Dan said nothing costs what it did 20 
years ago. As I prepare to return to the ranks of ordinary citizen, I 
find that nothing costs what it did 8 years ago. [Laughter] I can tell 
you, it's hard to find a reliable car for under $4,650.
    Last summer I took executive action allowing more families moving 
off welfare to own their cars and still receive food stamps. But we've 
got to raise the limits again to cover all low income working families. 
The budget I submitted last month does that. It allows another quarter 
of a million families to have a car and to get to work and still keep 
the food assistance for their children.
    That's in the budget, and that's Senator Specter's responsibility and why I'm so grateful to him for being 
here today, because this should be an American issue. This should not be 
a partisan issue. No American of any political party or philosophy has a 
vested interest in keeping somebody who's dying to work from getting 
there or in depriving children of the nutritional assistance they 
plainly need.
    The budget also takes two other important steps. It helps more low 
income families save money for a car through the Individual Development 
Account program, the IDA. You may have heard--I talked a little about 
that in the State of the Union--this is an idea that has enjoyed broad 
bipartisan support to try to help even poor people have the tools to 
save. Currently, thousands of low income families use these IDA's to 
save for college, a first home, to start a new business. And the Federal 
Government matches their savings. I want to include in that list--saving 
for college, a first home, starting a new business--saving to buy a car 
to get to work.
    We also budget our investment in the access to jobs initiative, 
which funds creative, locally designed transportation solutions, such as 
vanpools that a lot of nonprofits an faith-based groups have used. And 
I'm glad to see some representatives of those groups here today. They 
shuttle inner-city workers to suburban jobs.
    Now, this is usually not a practical solution for small towns and 
rural areas, but it can work very well in inner-city areas where the 
jobs are close together in the suburbs or where there's a big suburban 
employment center where you can take 20, 30, 50 people from a given 
inner-city neighborhood to one site of employment. But this is also 
very, very important.

[[Page 294]]

    I mean, consider the irony of this: We have employers all over the 
country suffering labor shortages. You have people like 
Michael who are going to community college 
and working and supporting two children by himself--doing everything 
they can do. Such people should not be held back by the absence of 
transportation or punished if they have the initiative and enterprise to 
buy a car, especially if, like him, they help to repair it in the first 
place. [Laughter] That's a great story.
    So, this is the smart thing to do. It's the right thing to do. If 
you want to keep the economy going without inflation, you've got to 
continue to train people to go into jobs that are already there. Then 
they become not only employees paying taxes, but they become consumers, 
and they add to the stock of our national wealth.
    Now, despite all these obstacles, millions of Americans who don't 
have cars still make it to work. They get up at dawn; they travel 2 
hours on three different buses to suburban jobs that pay 7 bucks an 
hour. They come home the same way, and somehow they still manage to get 
their kids to and from school and do the grocery shopping. They do it 
all without a car. They are, in so many ways, the real heroes of this 
country.
    We normally think of heroism as something done in a moment of 
immediate danger. But it may take more courage to get up every day 
against all the obstacles and live your life and raise your kids and do 
what you're supposed to do and walk away from whatever illegal options 
are out there for you and just keep banging away at it. The people who 
do this not only deserve our admiration; they deserve our support. And 
we ought to work for a day in America when that sort of heroism is not 
required to go to work and take care of your kids.
    If we can do these specific things we've talked about today, 
hundreds of thousands of people like Michael will be able to sleep better at night knowing they've 
done their work, taken care of their children, and their country wants 
them to be rewarded for it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:08 p.m. in Presidential Hall in the 
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to Michael Alexander, participant in a local program to help 
welfare recipients purchase a car, who introduced the President.