[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 51 (Monday, December 26, 1994)]
[Pages 2520-2522]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities

December 21, 1994

    Thank you very much. I want to thank the Vice President for his 
strong leadership in the Community Enterprise Board, Secretary Espy, 
Secretary Cisneros, Secretary Shalala, Attorney General Reno, the other 
members of the Cabinet and the administration who are here. And I 
congratulate all the communities who have won here today.
    This is an especially happy day for me because this announcement 
completes a commitment that was rooted in the campaign I waged for 
President but far more in my personal history as a public servant. There 
are many people here in this room to whom I owe a great deal of 
gratitude. But I want to say a special word of thanks to all those who 
worked with me for years and years and years, before I ever thought of 
even running for President, on the complex job of developing poor and 
distressed areas.
    Secretary Espy and I were partners a long time before we ever 
thought he'd ever be the Agriculture Secretary or I would be the 
President. I thank my friend, Bob Nash, from Arkansas for the work he's 
done in rural development. Henry Cisneros and I were having the 
conversations that we celebrate today for years before we were ever in 
the positions that we now hold. And there are others here, too numerous 
to mention, who were an inspiration to me because of what they did at 
the community level. But I'd like to mention in particular the 
outstanding work done by Andrew Cuomo, before he came to work at HUD, in 
New York and dealing with the problems of housing and homelessness.

[[Page 2521]]

    I say this because I came to this job with the absolute conviction 
that most problems in America had been solved by somebody somewhere and 
that we would never solve any of our most fundamental problems unless we 
did it at the community level. And if you look at the work that we have 
done in this administration, the work that Attorney General has done in 
law enforcement; getting people together at the community level; what is 
embodied in the crime bill, community strength, taking money by reducing 
the size of the Federal Government and giving it back to the community; 
if you look at the work that we have done in human services with giving 
21 States permission to pursue welfare reform and get through Federal 
rules and regulations, nine States permission to pursue the work of 
health care reform; if you look at the work we have done in education 
and training and the way the Federal laws have been rewritten to push 
more decisionmaking, more power down to the grassroots level, it is 
clear that to me, we have got to rely on the energy and the capacity of 
people to work at the community level where, frankly, they work in a far 
less partisan atmosphere than we have worked in Washington, where people 
deal with human problems in a human way and reach across the divisions 
of party and income and race and background to try to get something 
done. That is what I came to Washington to do.
    If you look at any number of other areas, you will see that. If you 
look at the fact that we've been able to solve some of the long-standing 
environmental problems; if you look at some of the things that are being 
done by Director Brown in the drug control area; just over and over and 
over again, what we want to do is to empower people at the community 
level to make the most of their own lives by solving their problems, and 
have the Federal Government be a support to them for a change and not a 
burden.
    That is what this is all about. And if I could construct a model of 
how it would all work in the end, it would be what national service does 
today, what the AmeriCorps program does. It is a totally 
nonbureaucratic, nonpolitical, grassroots, creative, entrepreneurial way 
of solving human problems. That is what we ought to be about. And for 
all of you that worked on this program, for all of you that had anything 
to do with my personal history before I came to this job, I thank you 
for the contribution that you have made because this is a very important 
departure from the way the National Government has operated for years 
and years and years. And it is critical to the work that we must do here 
to restore a sense of opportunity and a sense of responsibility to this 
country and to rebuild the middle class.
    If you look at the announcement that I made last week advocating a 
middle class bill of rights, looking forward to the next session of 
Congress, it furthers the goal of personal empowerment, recommending 
first of all, that people ought to be able to deduct the cost of post-
high school education for themselves and their kids and have a tax break 
for raising their children. It advocates that we should let everybody 
save more money in an IRA, but also take it out for something other than 
retirement if they need to take care of themselves for education or 
first-time homebuying or health care or the care of a parent, building 
on the capacity of people to solve their own problems. But the most 
important thing we can do is to do it in a way that helps communities to 
grow, that helps families to grow, that helps individuals to prosper.
    You know, we spent a lot of time in the last 2 years trying to clean 
up some of the problems we found here and fix things so that we could do 
things like what we celebrate today. We had to bring the deficit down in 
order to do that. We made a downpayment on middle-class tax fairness by 
giving an income tax cut to working families with incomes under $25,000 
of an average of $1,000 a year this year. That's something I'm very 
proud of because it shows that we're going in the right direction.
    But because we've got the deficit down, we can move on to have these 
empowerment zones. We can move on now to do the kinds of things that are 
in the middle class bill of rights. And we should continue to work on 
it, always with the idea that at the end of the day the actions of 
government should empower people and communities to take more 
responsibility for their own lives and their own successes. That's what 
the family

[[Page 2522]]

leave law was all about. That's what expanding Head Start was all about. 
That's what changing the whole student loan law was all about, so more 
people could borrow money at lower interest rates to finance their 
collage education. And that's what, as I said earlier, national service 
was all about, and it is certainly what the middle class bill of rights 
is all about.
    I want to say, also, that we have to do this in a way that is 
responsible not only for today but for tomorrow as well. Too many times, 
because of the heat of this election or this election or the one just 
ahead, politicians have told people the easy answers without telling 
them the hard ones as well. And I want to say, I am especially proud of 
the fact that we have paid for these empowerment initiatives through 
reducing the size of the Federal Government, through getting rid of a 
lot of yesterday's Government so we would have more of tomorrow's 
opportunity.
    This week, as you know, the Vice President and I announced another 
round of reinventing Government, of reductions that some of the Cabinet 
members here present took in their own operations to generate another 
$24 billion to pay for the middle class bill of rights. We will continue 
to do more of that.
    Because we have been responsible and disciplined, the overall health 
of the economy is sound. We have produced more than 5.2 million new jobs 
in this country in the last 2 years, and we will continue to do that if 
we can keep overall economic conditions favorable. What we now have to 
do is to bring the benefits of those overall things to ordinary 
Americans. The middle class bill of rights will do it by having more tax 
fairness, focusing on education, focusing on growth.
    All the community initiatives will do it, whether it's in the crime 
bill or the education bill or in the initiatives at HUD, or in national 
service. And this empowerment zone program will do it by saying to the 
American people, the Government's going to be a help to you, not a 
burden. Just imagine this, Chicago got 200 separate organizations to 
roll up their sleeves and work and agree on a project. You're lucky in 
Washington if you can get two people to agree to do that. [Laughter]
    But out there where people live, where they're not worried about 
what's in today's headlines but what their children's lives are going to 
be like tomorrow, they can do it if we help them. Just imagine in 
Detroit, a city that was given up for dead 10 years ago, the private 
sector committed $2 billion to this endeavor. All we had to do was to 
put up the $100 million and the prospect of the tax benefits. How did it 
happen? Because of the energy generated at the local level just because 
the Federal Government said we want to help you decide your own future 
for a change. And I tell you, as you probably heard on the telephone 
call, I've been in the hills and hollows of Kentucky. I have walked up 
and down the poorest communities in America in the Mississippi Delta. I 
have been all over south Texas. I know those places. And they have good, 
smart people, too. And their children deserve a future, too. And all we 
did was to give them a chance to figure out how they can make a better 
future for themselves.
    Now, that's what this administration is all about. That's what 
public life is all about out there on the main streets of America. And 
what we ought to do at this Christmas season is make a new year's 
resolution that next year with the middle class bill of rights, with 
more responsibility, with more empowerment, with more opportunity, 
that's what we're going to make public life like in Washington for a 
change.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 2:17 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building.