[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 2 (Monday, January 17, 2000)]
[Pages 63-66]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at Boricua College in Brooklyn, New York

January 13, 2000

    Thank you. You know, I have to tell you, I was sitting here 
listening to all the previous speakers and looking at the people in the 
audience, feeling very grateful for how good Brooklyn's been to me over 
the years, and thinking, you know, this is why I ran for President; 
these are the people that deserve help, a hand up, a chance to work 
together, and to live their dreams.
    Enealia Nau, thank you for your wonderful words. Thank you for the 
power of your example. Thank you for the kind things you said about my 
wife, who, I should tell you, has been involved, as I was, for now over 
15 years in these kind of endeavors. We brought a small development bank 
to our State, modeled on the Southshore Bank in Chicago, which did so 
much to revitalize difficult neighborhoods there. We started a 
microlending program, and we're now spreading microlending all across 
America. And last year we made 2 million loans in poor villages in Latin 
America and Africa and Asia, as well, to help people everywhere--
[inaudible].
    I always like to come to New York and give my wife a plug. I thought 
she was going to run for office here, but after David Letterman last 
night, she may be trying to get his job instead. [Laughter] I sat there, 
and I said, ``You know, I thought I was supposed to be the funny one in 
this family.'' [Laughter]
    I want to thank Aida Alvarez for the wonderful job she's doing. 
She's the first Puerto Rican American ever to serve in a President's 
Cabinet, and she's doing quite--[inaudible]. And I want to thank our HUD 
Deputy Secretary, Saul Ramirez, who has already been acknowledged. But 
he and Secretary Cuomo have been real champions of economic development 
here in New York and across the country. I thank him.
    President Alicea, thank you for having me here. I love to go to 
community-based educational institutions. I think they are in many ways 
the most successful institutions in America. They are entrepreneurial, 
creative, flexible, and they give everybody a chance at the brass ring. 
And so I thank you.
    I thank Jim King, the State director of the Small Business 
Development Center, and Woodrow McCutchen, the president of the National 
Association of Small Business Development Centers. I want to thank all 
the people who put up the money so far. Thank you, Steve Kravitz, for 
making this day possible. I want to thank Marge Magner and her boss, 
Sandy Weill, from Citigroup, for donating $100,000 to help launch this 
Boricua Small Business Development Center. I thank ACCION and its 
representative for being here.
    But most of all I want to say a word or two about Nydia Velazquez. 
She has one emotional level--intense. She communicates one feeling 
only--passion. [Laughter] When she asks you for something, you get the 
feeling that you can tell her yes now or tell her yes later. And in the 
end, you wind up with Enealia's pun on her last name; you decide to go 
for now. [Laughter]
    So she will do anything, I mean anything, to get her way. She took a 
trip with me on Air Force One. She gave dancing lessons to a Republican 
Congressman just to try to get him--[inaudible]. He was a very nice, 
attractive Republican, but being a Republican, he had rhythm problems. 
And he took care of it, you know. [Laughter] It was wonderful. I say 
that because I never want that to hurt her in her overwhelmingly 
Democratic district--she was just trying to build more bridges the way 
she always does. [Laughter]
    It is also true that she was one of the first people to say to me, 
now that we had turned the American economy around, we had to reach out 
to the markets in America that had not turned around. And so, for all of 
you, the most important thing I can just say is, thank you, because you 
have proved that this can work, and therefore, you have laid a very 
strong foundation for the legislation I'm going to ask Congress to pass 
this year.
    Let me just say, for example, if you look at the work of the Small 
Business Development Centers in New York State alone--let's just take 
New York State--the 5-year success rate of businesses getting off the 
ground here with the help of these local centers is an astonishing 95 
percent.

[[Page 64]]

    Now, as you have heard, the center that will be here at Boricua 
College is getting a tremendous boost from the New Markets Lending 
Cooperative that Representative Velazquez has been so instrumental in 
creating. This will provide more than $13 million in loans and venture 
capital for entrepreneurs like Ms. Nau. And many of them would not have 
access to capital in any other way.
    Again, let me say I want to thank ACCION, the Loan Source, Medallion 
Financial Corporation, all of them for their commitments to this 
cooperative. For hundreds of hardworking families in this community, you 
are underwriting the American dream.
    Over the past year, I've been to places that Presidents don't 
normally go. I've been to Watts. I've been to Watts half a dozen times 
since I started running for office, but I went back to Watts. I've been 
to inner-city Newark, inner-city Atlanta, the poorest housing projects 
in Chicago, in East St. Louis, the barrios of south Phoenix and 
Hartford, rural and farming communities in my native State of Arkansas 
and Mississippi and Kentucky. I've been to the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation in South Dakota, where the unemployment rate is 73 percent. 
In every one of these places, and here in Williamsburg, as well, I see 
potential, not hopelessness.
    Now, here's the pitch I try to make when I'm not here to get support 
for many, many more endeavors of this kind. Seven years ago, when I 
started this odyssey as President, we had national economic distress, 
social decline, discredited Government. But today--so we could be 
forgiven for concentrating on the big needs of the majority of the 
American people--we had to turn the ship of state around.
    But now we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest 
welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest 
poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 
years, the first back-to-back balanced budgets in 42 years--surpluses. 
We have, for the first time in my lifetime, a strong economy, an 
improving social fabric, and the absence of severe domestic crises or 
foreign crises. Now if we cannot fulfill our responsibility now to give 
every American a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential, 
when in the wide world will we ever get around to it? If we can't do it 
now, when will we ever do it?
    The second thing I want to do is to amplify a little bit on a point 
that Nydia made, that this is good business. A long way from this 
community in Washington, DC, you would be amazed at how many hours we 
spend with our economic team--and Aida has been part of it--and how many 
hours they spend over at the Federal Reserve, with Mr. Greenspan, 
figuring out how can we keep this economic growth going. In just a few 
weeks, this economic expansion will become the longest expansion in the 
history of the country, eclipsing those which occurred in wartime, when 
we were fully mobilized. Now how do you keep it going? Well, what 
normally kills expansion? They run out of steam because there is no 
opportunity to grow, or the growth leads to inflation. And then to break 
inflation you have to raise interest rates. And that ends the economic 
expansion because people can't afford to borrow any money anymore, and 
they're paying more for what they've already borrowed. And they get in 
trouble, so that ends it.
    Now, is there an inflation-free way to keep the economy going? Yes, 
there is. What is it? You have to find new markets and create new jobs 
and new businesses in places where they didn't exist before. If, at the 
same time, you create new businesses and new employees and new 
consumers, you will have more growth without inflation.
    So in a funny way--you need to know this--what you're doing here is 
good for people in North Dakota where the unemployment rate is under 3 
percent. It's good for people in New Hampshire where the unemployment 
rate is under 3 percent. Why? Because you are permitting them to having 
a growing American economy without inflation.
    So every American should be supporting this, not only because it's 
morally right to give people who are poor and who don't have access to 
capital the chance to live their dreams but because it is in our self-
interest as a nation if we want to keep this astonishing economic 
revival going.

[[Page 65]]

    And more and more people are coming to understand that. I thank the 
Congress on a bipartisan basis for already passing the first bill last 
year appropriating the funding, the first level of funding for my 
national new markets initiative. Now we're working to pass a set of tax 
incentives and loan guarantees to give companies the same financial 
incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in 
poor areas in Latin America or Africa or Asia.
    I support the incentives we give American businesses and financial 
institutions to invest overseas. Those people are our customers too, and 
they're our partners for the future. And if we want democracy and peace 
and harmony to reign around the world, people need a chance to live 
their dreams, too. It's no accident that the crime rate goes down in 
America when the economy goes up. And the trouble rate goes down around 
the world when the economy goes up. But I do believe that people in 
America deserve to have the same opportunities from their Government, 
and people in America with money deserve to have the same incentives 
from their Government to help Americans that we give them to help people 
in the rest of the world. And that's the basic theory behind the new 
markets initiative.
    An essential component of this is the new markets venture capital 
fund, which your Representative in Congress has played such an enormous 
role in creating. The idea is basically simple, but I want to explain 
it. For every dollar in equity capital you invest in America's new 
markets, we will give another dollar in Government-backed loans, 
effectively doubling the investments. Altogether, we think this program 
that Nydia has helped to create will stimulate $1.3 billion over 5 years 
in new investments to start up and expand businesses in areas that have 
been left behind in urban and rural America. And I thank her again for 
this remarkable thing.
    Now we still have to pass this. That's why we need her passion and 
focus, you see. [Laughter] And it is a great testament to the efforts 
that she and others have made that not very long ago we had a big new 
markets event in Chicago. And the Speaker of the House, who is from 
Illinois, joined us there--just a couple of months ago. He made it clear 
that he is ready to work with us to come to agreement on legislation 
early this year. And I talked to him a few days ago, he reaffirmed that 
commitment. If we do get this kind of bipartisan agreement, I don't want 
you to forget that Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez will be a major reason 
why we get this done.
    Let me just close with this. Think about where we are now as opposed 
to where we were a hundred years ago, right here. At the turn of the 
last century, Williamsburg was known as one of the best incubators of 
new businesses anywhere in America. It was positioned near a big port 
and a major market. The waterfront was packed with docks, shipyards, 
warehouses, metal works, sugar refineries, and mills. After World War 
II, everything changed.
    Today you've heard your unemployment rate, your poverty rate, and 
your rate of homeownership are more than twice the national average in 
the wrong direction. But the people here represent a whole new wave of 
American immigrants, more than 90 ethnic groups represented within just 
a mile or so of where we are. And Williamsburg once again is becoming a 
remarkable incubator, from retailers and restaurants to bodegas and 
bookshops. And the economy is changing.
    We had a huge wave of immigrants who came into New York City 100 
years ago, from all over the world, just as people began to move from 
rural areas in America to the city, because the economy changed from an 
agricultural economy to an industrial economy. And America was changing 
with it, and people saw hope. Well, the economy has changed again. And 
for 30 years, Brooklyn bore the brunt of it, as the industrial economy 
shrank, particularly in the number of employees it took to produce 
things and manufacture them. And we developed a new information-based 
economy in an increasingly globalized society.
    But we're hooking into that now with things like information 
services. There's a tremendous opportunity out there for people who will 
help do what lawyer Nau is doing--now. [Laughter] And this represents a 
clear understanding that most of the job growth is coming in America 
from small businesses, and most people who start small businesses have a 
good idea of what they want to do,

[[Page 66]]

but they may not know how to do it, or all the other stuff you've got to 
do just to do what you want to do and what you're trained and skilled to 
do.
    So this is a big part of America continuing its growth and using, 
literally, the only chance in my lifetime, which is getting a little 
longer as the days go by, the only chance in my lifetime we have ever 
had to give every American who is willing to work the chance to live the 
American dream.
    So I want to say again how profoundly grateful I am to all of you, 
to say thank you, and Dios los bendiga. Bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:55 a.m. in the third floor atrium. In 
his remarks, he referred to Enealia Nau, Brooklyn business owner, who 
introduced the President; Victor Alicea, president, Boricua College; 
Steven D. Kravitz, president, Loan Source, Inc.; Marge Magner, Primerica 
Financial Services and Citibanking North America executive; Sanford I. 
Weill, chief executive officer, Citigroup; Terri Ludwig, president and 
chief executive officer of ACCION; and late night television talk show 
host David Letterman.