Bill Clinton: “Let me say, one of the--just a couple of things real quick. Is it--one of the big entertainment organizations sponsors…”

“Let me say, one of the--just a couple of things real quick. Is it--one of the big entertainment organizations sponsors every year a big event honoring teachers. Is it Disney? Disney. Maybe we should see if we should do something with them. On this unemployment, one of you mentioned this earlier--I think it was Hugh that mentioned it--but we announced today, it was in the paper, that we're going to spend a ton of money to try to focus on just training people to take jobs in technology companies. And the reason-- how that happened was I read two things at the same time several weeks ago. I get--a month after the unemployment rates comes out, the people who do the unemployment rates give you the State-by-State for that month, so like every month you're getting this month's national unemployment rate and last month's State-by-State. So I don't have the December State-by-States, but I do have it for November. In November, two States, North Dakota and one other--Nebraska, I think--had 1.9 percent unemployment. Now, that is essentially negative unemployment because any economist will tell you there's somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the people walking around all the time. I mean, they're moving; they're getting married; they change States; they do something; something is always happening to a couple percent of the people that are just--in the way we measure unemployment. And Washington, DC, had 7.8, or whatever it was. And at the same time--this was this month. Anyway, the month before when this happened, the same day I pick up this article in the Washington Post which says that in all these suburban counties around Washington, DC, there's this huge shortage of high-technology workers. Well, if Washington, DC, had an unemployment rate of 2 percent instead of nearly 8 percent, we'd have about a quarter of the problems we've got here, maybe a tenth. And so it occurred to me that a lot of--but a lot of these jobs in high-technology areas do not require 4-year college degrees. They do require technology training; they do require advanced skills over what you would get just coming out of high school. But they do not require a 4-year college degree. So what this announcement in the paper is about-- it's Alexis Herman and some others, we've been working on this--we're trying to figure out whether, not just in DC but anywhere around the country where you've got this suburban ring of job demand and a high unemployment core, whether we can go in there and do profiles on people and see who is capable of getting these skills. And we're going to try and do it in some of the less urbanized areas, too. One of the problems--a lot of our Native Americans without jobs, without good jobs, live in highly dispersed areas where it's not as easy to get there. But anyway, if this works--that is, if 4 months from now we can show you that we did ``X'' amount of training and the people that formerly would have gone into minimum wage jobs are now going into jobs that pay above-average wages, where they actually get retirement and health insurance and other things, because they got this--it will rather dramatically change the nature of job training and the whole strategy that the Federal Government has generally followed. So, anyway--but I appreciate what you're saying about it. Bob, you were next, I think. [Representative Robert T. Matsui commended the President for the diversity within his administration. He stated that affirmative action was a critical issue because its elimination would have a profound negative impact on the Nation. He also stressed the need to address inner-city poverty by involving the private sector in long-term planning, as well as technology and empowerment zone initiatives.]”