Bill Clinton: “The people who are specifically displaced, there are only three things you can do for them in my opinion, that I can…”

“The people who are specifically displaced, there are only three things you can do for them in my opinion, that I can think of, anyway. And I've been working at this now for the better part of 20 years, on and off. One is, they should have access to a system of training and education that is much more effective than the one we have today. The Federal Government's got 150 different employment training programs. The unemployment system, as all of you know, still works like it used to: You get an unemployment check, and you're supposed to basically check around and see if you can find a new job. But the idea is, people wait until the benefits run out, hoping their old employer will call them back. That used to happen; it doesn't happen much anymore. What we're going to do is to construct a system that will give anybody who loses their job because of a trade-related dislocation access to a much better training program, much more quickly, tied to identifying those areas where the jobs are growing in number anywhere within driving distance of them, first thing. Secondly, we're going to have a development bank, a North American development bank which will concentrate its activities in areas where there have been substantial job losses to try to start new job enterprises there. The third thing we're going to do is to develop special investment incentives targeted to those areas where the jobs have been lost. Those are the only things that I can think of that we can do, except to give you a healthy economy that's producing more jobs. One of the things that makes this so frightening to people is that it used to be--I mean, when I was a kid, when somebody lost their job, when the country had a 3 percent unemployment rate, that was like having zero unemployment, because there were 3 percent of the people who were moving around all the time. Now when people lose their jobs, they're afraid they'll never get another one or they'll never get another one paying as much as the one that they just lost. So we have a much heavier responsibility. The answer to your question is that you should be able to see these specific programs on the books not by October of '96 but by the end of the budget cycle in '94; we should have passed these programs and put them in place for those folks, because that's when you'll begin to see it. In other words, when we adopt the trade agreement the end of this year, we have $90 million set aside right now for extra training investment for those folks in the short run, to buy us a year and a half to enact a new training program and investment strategy. But we should be able to get it done by the end of '94 when Congress goes home; that's our goal. And if I could plug my wife a bit, if we provide health care security to all of them, that'll also be a huge incentive, because then at least they won't lose that for their children.”