[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 8 (Monday, February 28, 2000)]
[Pages 359-361]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks Announcing Budget Initiatives on Transportation 
for Working Families

February 23, 2000

    Thank you very much. Let's give him a hand. [Applause] There you go. 
Wasn't he great? Thank you very much, Michael. We all know you don't do 
this public speaking for a living, and you did a terrific job. You may 
have a few more job interviews after the day is over. [Laughter] For 
those of you who don't know, Brocton, New York, is near Buffalo. So if 
this message goes out there to western New York, Michael is looking for 
a good job. [Laughter] And if he takes one, there are a lot of other 
people who are, too, out there.
    I want to thank Secretary Glickman for being here and for his 
support of this endeavor. I want to thank our Deputy Secretary of the 
Department of Transportation, Mort Downey, for their work, he and 
Secretary Slater. And I want to say a special word of welcome to Senator 
Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, who has kept our welfare-to-work policy 
completely bipartisan, and I thank you, sir, for what you've done, and 
I'm glad you're here.
    I grew up with and served as a Governor for a lot of people like 
Michael Alexander. In my term of service in Arkansas we had, depending 
on what census it was, somewhere between 5 and 10 of the poorest 
counties in America. Some were in the Mississippi Delta, and they were 
predominantly African-American. Some where in the Arkansas Ozarks; they 
were overwhelmingly white. They were all full--they were all rural 
counties, and they were all full of people who lived in little places 
and had to go to bigger places to work. They all wanted to work, and 
they all wanted to do right by their kids.
    And I saw this young man up here speaking, and I'm thinking about 
what it must be like to be his age with his whole life still before him, 
two little kids under foot, trying to figure out how to do right by 
them. Somebody like that shouldn't have to worry about whether they can 
go out and get in the car, whether the car will start, and if they get 
in a car, whether they won't be able to get food for their children. 
That's what this is all about.
    And what I want you to know is, there are lots of Michael Alexanders 
out there in America. They're from all backgrounds, all races, all 
faiths. And for those of us who grew up in places where a lot of Michael 
Alexanders live, we know that but for a bump in the road, a lot of 
others of us could be in the same fix they're in. That's what this is 
all about.
    We have worked very hard for 7 years now, based on a vision I had in 
1992 that everybody that was responsible enough to work for it ought to 
have a shot at the American dream. And a lot more people do today, for 
the reasons that Secretary Glickman said. The Congress has helped us not 
just by getting rid of the deficit and getting interest rates down and 
getting investment up but also trying to make work pay.
    That's what the earned-income tax credit's all about. And I hope 
Congress will expand it again by trying to make sure that especially 
parents in his position can, under family leave, more of them can take a 
little time off without losing their jobs if their children are in 
trouble or their parents are sick. And I think we ought to expand the 
law to cover regular visits to schools, too. You heard Michael mention 
that.
    And it's working all right. And it's working--the poverty rate is 
way down, lowest in 20 years, lowest Hispanic poverty rate in 20 years, 
lowest African-American poverty rate ever recorded, since we've been 
keeping separate statistics for about 30 years now. But there are still 
a lot of people who are responsible enough to work and go to school, who 
are not being rewarded with a chance to succeed at work, at school, and 
raising their kids,

[[Page 360]]

and work themselves into a middle class lifestyle. And as you just heard 
in graphic terms, one of the biggest barriers today is transportation 
and not, interestingly enough, not just for people living in small towns 
like Brocton but also increasingly for people living in inner cities.
    Why? Because two-thirds of all the new jobs are now being created in 
suburbs, which means if you're living in the inner city or in a small 
town, you're someplace different from where the jobs are. And if you're 
living in a city with perfectly wonderful public transportation, 9 times 
out of 10 it doesn't run to the suburbs. So even if you have access to 
public transportation, it probably doesn't take you to where the jobs 
are.
    Three-quarters of all the Americans who get public assistance live 
in central cities or rural areas; two-thirds of the new jobs are in the 
suburbs. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that transportation is 
critical to matching the available work force with the available jobs.
    Now consider this, just for example. A low wage job seeker living in 
Watts in Los Angeles who has a car can get to 57 times more jobs than a 
person living in Watts who does not have a car and has to depend on 
public transportation.
    Nationwide, low income families with cars are 25 percent more likely 
to work than those without cars. If you want more people to work, you've 
got to help them get to work. The first step is to eliminate the 
roadblocks that keep them from getting or keeping a car. Among the most 
senseless of them are food stamp rules that force low income families to 
choose between the food they need for their children and the car they 
need to work. No family should have to make that choice. And today I 
want to take some action to help make sure fewer do.
    Under current rules, a family that makes a few-hundred-dollar 
downpayment on a car immediately can become ineligible for food stamps, 
even though it's the bank, not the family, that owns the car. Today we 
are releasing a new regulation that will allow families with as much as 
$1,000 of equity in a car to keep the car and remain eligible for food 
stamps. That will help 150,000 people like Michael have a car for work 
and still have food stamps for their kids--150,000.
    Another roadblock in the law says you're ineligible for food stamps 
if the car you own, as Secretary Glickman said, is worth more than 
$4,650, a limit set by Congress over 20 years ago. Since then, the price 
of the average car has tripled. Dan said nothing costs what it did 20 
years ago. As I prepare to return to the ranks of ordinary citizen, I 
find that nothing costs what it did 8 years ago. [Laughter] I can tell 
you, it's hard to find a reliable car for under $4,650.
    Last summer I took executive action allowing more families moving 
off welfare to own their cars and still receive food stamps. But we've 
got to raise the limits again to cover all low income working families. 
The budget I submitted last month does that. It allows another quarter 
of a million families to have a car and to get to work and still keep 
the food assistance for their children.
    That's in the budget, and that's Senator Specter's responsibility 
and why I'm so grateful to him for being here today, because this should 
be an American issue. This should not be a partisan issue. No American 
of any political party or philosophy has a vested interest in keeping 
somebody who's dying to work from getting there or in depriving children 
of the nutritional assistance they plainly need.
    The budget also takes two other important steps. It helps more low 
income families save money for a car through the Individual Development 
Account program, the IDA. You may have heard--I talked a little about 
that in the State of the Union--this is an idea that has enjoyed broad 
bipartisan support to try to help even poor people have the tools to 
save. Currently, thousands of low income families use these IDA's to 
save for college, a first home, to start a new business. And the Federal 
Government matches their savings. I want to include in that list--saving 
for college, a first home, starting a new business--saving to buy a car 
to get to work.
    We also budget our investment in the access to jobs initiative, 
which funds creative, locally designed transportation solutions, such as 
vanpools that a lot of nonprofits an faith-based groups have used. And 
I'm glad to see some representatives of those groups

[[Page 361]]

here today. They shuttle inner-city workers to suburban jobs.
    Now, this is usually not a practical solution for small towns and 
rural areas, but it can work very well in inner-city areas where the 
jobs are close together in the suburbs or where there's a big suburban 
employment center where you can take 20, 30, 50 people from a given 
inner-city neighborhood to one site of employment. But this is also 
very, very important.
    I mean, consider the irony of this: We have employers all over the 
country suffering labor shortages. You have people like Michael who are 
going to community college and working and supporting two children by 
himself--doing everything they can do. Such people should not be held 
back by the absence of transportation or punished if they have the 
initiative and enterprise to buy a car, especially if, like him, they 
help to repair it in the first place. [Laughter] That's a great story.
    So, this is the smart thing to do. It's the right thing to do. If 
you want to keep the economy going without inflation, you've got to 
continue to train people to go into jobs that are already there. Then 
they become not only employees paying taxes, but they become consumers, 
and they add to the stock of our national wealth.
    Now, despite all these obstacles, millions of Americans who don't 
have cars still make it to work. They get up at dawn; they travel 2 
hours on three different buses to suburban jobs that pay 7 bucks an 
hour. They come home the same way, and somehow they still manage to get 
their kids to and from school and do the grocery shopping. They do it 
all without a car. They are, in so many ways, the real heroes of this 
country.
    We normally think of heroism as something done in a moment of 
immediate danger. But it may take more courage to get up every day 
against all the obstacles and live your life and raise your kids and do 
what you're supposed to do and walk away from whatever illegal options 
are out there for you and just keep banging away at it. The people who 
do this not only deserve our admiration; they deserve our support. And 
we ought to work for a day in America when that sort of heroism is not 
required to go to work and take care of your kids.
    If we can do these specific things, we've talked about today, 
hundreds of thousands of people like Michael will be able to sleep 
better at night knowing they've done their work, taken care of their 
children, and their country wants them to be rewarded for it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:08 p.m. in Presidential Hall in the 
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to Michael Alexander, a participant in his local social 
service's program to help welfare recipients purchase a car, who 
introduced the President.