[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 27 (Monday, July 12, 1999)]
[Pages 1318-1322]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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.
    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

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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 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 proceeded.]

    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

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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 listen 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 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 12 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, 2d District; and Walgreens manager Angela 
Tennon.

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