[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 42 (Monday, October 25, 1999)]
[Pages 2119-2121]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the White House Conference on Philanthropy

October 22, 1999

    Thank you, and good afternoon. I am delighted to welcome all of you 
here. I thank all those who are here from our Government and all of you 
who have come from all over our country and all walks of life to this 
very, very important meeting.
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to Hillary for yet 
another wonderful idea. This was a good idea to have this conference. 
And all of you who have helped on any of these millennium projects, I 
think it's done us a lot of good to take time out and think about the 
really big issues in our society and how we want them to play out in the 
years ahead. And particularly, I think this is an important issue at an 
important moment.
    A long time ago, Alexis de Tocqueville said that charity in America 
was something more than simple compassion; it was a sign of good 
citizenship. He wrote, ``Americans make great and real sacrifices to the 
public welfare. They hardly ever fail to lend faithful support to one 
another.''
    Today, this is a strong tradition, and the face of this tradition is 
changing. Philanthropy is, like our country, now more diverse as new 
groups seize and share opportunity in the new economy. It is more 
democratic, as Americans of all income levels, believe it or not, give 
at roughly equal levels. It is younger, as the high-tech economy creates 
a new generation of philanthropists.
    I've got to take a little time out. Last night, I had dinner with a 
lot of these high-tech gurus who made allowances for the fact that I am 
obviously technologically challenged. [Laughter] And we were talking 
about how we were all going to relate to each other and maximize the 
potential of the information age. And I started talking about this 
conference today, and I said, ``We've got to get

[[Page 2120]]

more people to give.'' I said, ``I would like it if Internet usage were 
as dense in America as telephone usage is, if we had 98 percent 
penetration, everybody had an E-mail address. I think we could have a 
dramatic impact on education and on poverty. I think we could skip a 
whole generation of development. And how are we going to get this 
done?''
    So there is this guy standing there. He's 27 years old, you know. He 
says, ``Well, you know, when I got out of college, I started this 
company, and 3 years later, I sold it for $150 million, and I started 
three others.'' And he said, ``What you need is founder stock.'' 
[Laughter] He said, ``We need to go all over America and gather up 
founder stock and put it in a big trust to make universal the access to 
the Internet.'' He said, ``Because you've got all these guys like me 
that don't know we're rich yet. We're still living on $30,000, and we've 
got all this stock.'' [Laughter] So he said, ``That's what you need.''
    So I've now given you my contribution to this conference--
[laughter]--which I learned at the foot of a 28-year-old last night. 
[Laughter] So, I mean, that's encouraging to people like me who aren't 
young, you know? [Laughter] We don't have to depend on the Rockefellers 
and the Mellons and the Carnegies or even the Paul Newmans. We can go 
get founder stock. [Laughter]
    I also think it's important to point out that not only the ways of 
giving are changing but the people--when I saw that film, I was so proud 
that there was a Federal employee that had given every single month for 
25 years, someone obviously of modest means, doubtless a lot of other 
claims on her income. So I want to thank people like Mary Grayson and 
others who are giving. And I think we ought to think about new 
opportunities, or I think the buzz word is ``portals,'' that are opening 
in the world of on-line philanthropy and how we can make sure that we 
can continue not only to increase the volume of money but to broaden the 
base of giving.
    We'll hear today about venture philanthropists and startup charities 
and other ways in which the entrepreneurial spirit is invading and 
energizing this field.
    I would like to also point out that volunteering is another 
important way of giving. This week Hillary and I celebrated the fifth 
anniversary of AmeriCorps. And we've already had 150,000 young people 
serve, and I'm very, very proud of that. I think that is an important 
thing to say. In a lot of ways, the measure of our life and our 
happiness is--to paraphrase one of the many wonderful things Martin 
Luther King said, can be answered by the question: What are you doing 
for others?
    So I'm encouraged by this conference, by the energy here. Some of my 
favorite people in all our country are out here in this audience today, 
people I have admired, some of you for 20 or 30 years, for all the 
things that I have watched you do for others. And I thank you for 
coming.
    I am glad that the sheer volume of charitable giving is going off 
the charts, but I think, as we've had this phenomenal increase in wealth 
in our country, I would feel even better if the percentage of our 
national income devoted to charitable giving had gone up just a little 
bit. You heard Hillary say what we could do if we could just increase it 
by one percent. But going from 2 to 3 percent is a huge increase. We've 
been sort of stuck at 2 percent. Now, when the stock market triples, 2 
percent is a lot more than it used to be. That's not real pocket change; 
it's real money.
    But if you think about what we could do with just a little more, I 
think it is really worth pondering. We're having the same debate in 
Congress now, and I don't want to get into any kind of a political 
dispute about that, but just let me give you an example. I very much 
want the United States to take the lead with the rest of the wealthy 
countries in alleviating the debt of the poorest countries in the world, 
and the Pope has asked us to do it for the millennium. Now, this is a 
campaign with a broad base: It's being spearheaded by the Pope and Bono, 
the lead singer for U2. [Laughter] And even though I am not a candidate 
for anything anymore, I can spot a big tent when I see it. [Laughter]
    So you know, we ought to do this. And this is just a little bit of 
all the money we've got. And it's just like de Tocqueville said a long 
time ago: This is not just charity; this is good citizenship. We take 
this burden off these people. If they are well governed and

[[Page 2121]]

they are working hard, we give them a chance to be our partners and 
friends in a more equal and balanced way for the future.
    So there are things for all of us to do. I would like to--I would 
hope today that I will learn something and that we will learn something 
about how we can, at least incrementally, increase the percentage of our 
income we are devoting to philanthropy. I hope we will learn something, 
as I already said, about the ways we can do it. And I hope we will learn 
a little bit about whether we can all give smarter and whether we can 
make sure that the money we are giving is spent in the most effective 
possible way.
    I take it we all begin by accepting that we no longer believe that 
there is a choice out there, which was never a real choice, between 
Government meeting all of our society's needs and Government walking 
away from them all and letting philanthropy do it. We have to have a 
better partnership, and it will work better if we do.
    We need to think about, in Government, whether we can do more things 
to generate more constructive philanthropy. The Treasury Department will 
meet with representatives of the nonprofit sector next month to discuss 
this. And I, in the meanwhile, am going to establish an intergency task 
force to strengthen our philanthropic partnership between government, 
nonprofit groups, and citizens, and to ask the Council of Economic 
Advisers to do me a study on the role of philanthropy in the American 
economy and how they believe I can increase it.
    By analyzing trends in charitable giving, by assessing the impact of 
the baby boomers' retirement, which--it's going to be interesting to see 
whether it makes us more or less generous when we retire, this largest 
of all generations of Americans. It should make us more generous, 
because the kids in school are finally the first generation bigger than 
the baby boomers, and they need our help.
    But we need to think about that. What's our message going to be to 
the baby boomers as they move toward retirement? What's our message 
going to be to people thinking about the shape of our social tensions as 
we double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years? What's our 
message going to be to ourselves, those of us in the baby boom 
generation, about how our citizenship responsibilities should grow when 
we lay down the burdens of retirement, particularly if we've been lucky 
enough to have a secure way to maintain our standard of living?
    This is deserving of an awful lot of thought because there is a 
whole bunch of us. And on the whole, those who manage to escape a career 
in politics are going to be better off than any generation in American 
history. [Laughter] So some serious thought needs to be given to this.
    Well, I've had a little fun with this today. But I am really 
grateful to you all for being here. This is a big deal. We all know--the 
truth is we're all fairly pleased with ourselves for being here because 
you feel better about your life when you've spent a portion of it doing 
something for somebody else. And you feel better about the good fortune 
you have financially if you spend at least a little of it giving 
something to someone else.
    So what we want to do is to start the new millennium poised to do 
more and to do it better, and to give more chances to more people to 
participate.
    Thank you all very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:22 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to U.S. Postal Service employee Mary 
Grayson; and Pope John Paul II.