Bill Clinton: “Well, I think they should help him because he's been a part of it, but that's not why I proposed them. Keep in…”

“Well, I think they should help him because he's been a part of it, but that's not why I proposed them. Keep in mind--look at the record. In January of 1993, my first month in office, I proposed the empowerment zones to try to get extra incentives in the inner cities and the economically distressed areas, even when the whole country was in economic trouble. And we set out this empowerment zone enterprise community program under the leadership of Vice President Gore way back in '93. So this is something that we have done all along. And I have tried to--I've increased the number of empowerment zones. Now it's twice as many. We fought for funding for them in this budget cycle. Actually, what led to this proposal is that I was asking myself two questions. One is, how can I get beyond the empowerment zone? They help the areas where they are, but we can't put them everywhere; we don't have enough money to invest everywhere in the empowerment zones, everywhere there is a need. And then the second question I was asking myself is, how do we keep the economic growth going without inflation? You know, I'm not all that surprised that we've been as fortunate as we have been because I believed always that if we could get a good economic policy--that is if we could get rid of the deficit, get interest rates down, keep expanding trade, and make the right kind of long-term investments--that technology and open markets would give us higher growth with less inflation than most economists had estimated. I made this argument in December of '92 when we started all this. But I have been very frustrated that we have not been able to bring jobs and businesses and the general entrepreneurial spirit to some of the tougher neighborhoods and more isolated places in the country. So that's how we came around to this new markets idea. We were trying to figure out a way to keep the economy going and to get opportunity in the places where the empowerment zones wouldn't reach. Administration's Relations With Corporate America Mr. Cavuto. But you have to compel them to follow, right? I mean, you have to provide an inspirational lead for that. And I guess some of the companies that I noticed, Mr. President, who are involved with this--Aetna, for example--seem to get mixed reads from your administration: Yes, participate in these type of programs; at the same time, the Government is bashing HMO's. There seems to be a disconnect among many in corporate America, I guess, with you personally and with the administration generally. Yes, it talks the talk and wants help and incentives and that sort of thing, but there's almost like an anticorporate environment, whether it's investigating Microsoft or looking down at Intel or now going after seven utilities and whether they are violating environmental laws--that this is an anticorporate White House.”