[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Pages 860-861]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the New Markets Initiative

May 11, 1999

    Thank you very much. I'd like to begin by thanking all the business 
leaders who have come here to be with us today, the members of the 
administration who are here, and especially the Vice President, for the 
work that he has done to spearhead our community empowerment effort over 
the last 6 years and a few months.
    I'd like to just say just a word or two by way of introduction to 
try to highlight why I asked these business leaders here today. You 
heard the Vice President talk about what we have tried to do since we 
came here, since we passed the first economic plan to give genuine 
economic opportunity to all of our citizens: the empowerment zones, the 
community development banks, the kinds of incentives we were trying to 
give to create jobs and opportunity for people who hadn't had them.
    And we are very grateful for the record declines in unemployment 
among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and for the fact that the 
unemployment rate has dropped dramatically, not only overall but in many 
of our toughest, toughest neighborhoods throughout the country.
    On the other hand, even though we have the lowest peacetime 
unemployment rate since 1957, there are still 37 cities--37--where 
unemployment is double the national average. There are lots of smaller 
communities where children still have to go past abandoned storefronts 
to get to a grocery store to buy a carton of milk. There are rural areas 
and very small towns which have had almost no new investment in the last 
6 years. And of course, in many, many of our Native American areas and 
communities there is still a great deal of economic distress and 
uncertainty.
    So what this whole effort has been about from the beginning for me, 
and especially what we are working on now, is the idea that we should go 
into the 21st century leaving no one behind. We should genuinely create 
opportunity for every responsible citizen. And we are being given a 
chance to do it.
    I told the folks we met with today, it's very--I've spent a lot of 
time over the last 6 or 7 years studying how the American economy works 
as compared with other advanced economies in the world. And on balance, 
we've done a better job of creating jobs, while others have worked 
harder to maintain a sense of community and a greater degree of equality 
among working people. The price they have paid is that they have higher 
unemployment rates than we do.
    We have been given an opportunity now, because we've got the 
strongest economy in at least a generation, to prove that we can bring 
the benefits of free enterprise to every neighborhood in America. We can 
prove that you can have low unemployment and increasing opportunity. The 
Vice President pointed out today that the wealth that minority families, 
for example, and families that live in poor rural areas have is still 
dramatically less than the wealth that average Americans have. They 
don't ever have a chance to accumulate anything.

[[Page 861]]

    This initiative that we are taking, we believe can change all that. 
We believe it builds on what we've done with the empowerment zones, with 
the enterprise communities, with the community development banks. We do 
want the Congress to give us another round of empowerment zones, and we 
want more.
    In July I am going to visit communities for 2 or 3 days in our most 
stubborn pockets of poverty. I'm going places not just to remind America 
of the plight of the Americans who live there but to highlight their 
enormous economic potential and the visionary businesses who are helping 
to develop it.
    Let me say again, the people who are here behind me, I was 
astonished when we listened in the meeting this morning about some of 
the things that they're already doing to bring opportunity to people in 
the areas they serve. But we have to do more.
    You know, for years our Government has worked to give Americans 
incentives to invest in emerging markets around the world. But we now 
know, as we look forward to how we can continue to create jobs and have 
economic growth without inflation, that our greatest untapped markets 
are here at home--at least $85 billion in untapped markets.
    So how are we going to do this? First, the business leaders of our 
country have to help us. We have to mobilize the private sector to bring 
new jobs and opportunities. We know that, since the Government, the 
Federal Government is the smallest it has been since 1962, what we can 
do is to do what we have been doing. We can find a new way to create the 
conditions and give the private sector the tools to bring investment to 
these areas to put people to work.
    Now, how can we do that? More empowerment zones, more community 
development banks, but also our new markets initiative. Many of the 
people here with me today said, ``What we need, if we want more 
investments in the inner cities, more investments in the medium-sized 
cities and small towns, more investments in rural areas, you've got to 
have more equity investment.'' So in the State of the Union I proposed 
this new markets initiative to leverage billions of dollars in that kind 
of investment by providing tax credits of up to 25 percent of the equity 
placed in untapped markets.
    I also proposed to create American private investment companies and 
new market venture capital firms to bring more equity capital to 
investors who develop or expand in these areas with loan guarantees that 
would cover up to two-thirds of the investment. If you have 25 percent 
tax credit for what's at risk and a loan guarantee of two-thirds of the 
rest and a plain market there and we can actually get this out in simple 
terms that people can understand, I think we have a chance to spark an 
enormous amount of economic development in America before this 
administration's work is done.
    We should not be thinking of our success without an equal 
determination to give every one of our fellow citizens a chance to be a 
part of it as we go into a new century. We don't have to leave anyone 
behind. And if we can't do this now, when in the wide world will we ever 
get around to it?
    So, July we'll make the tour. In a few days we'll go down to south 
Texas, to the Vice President's annual empowerment conference. And we 
will continue to work with the business leaders that are here to do 
things that make sense. But the bottom line is we need the Congress to 
work with us in a bipartisan way. Of all the things in the world, this 
should not be a partisan political issue. We want to provide the 
economic incentives necessary to create jobs, keep growth going in 
America, keep inflation low, and go into that new century with 
everyone--everyone--walking hand-in-hand together.
    Thank you very, very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:25 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White 
House.