Bill Clinton: “If I might say--this is a problem--this particular problem she has mentioned is a bigger problem with Asian-Americans…”

“If I might say--this is a problem--this particular problem she has mentioned is a bigger problem with Asian-Americans than with any other minority group, but it is also a general problem in the work that we're trying to do around the country in revitalizing the inner cities. If you look at the American unemployment rate now, which is about 4.3 percent--it's the lowest it's been since 19--I think '74, '73, something like that, now--and when I became President, the conventional theory among economists--we had these huge arguments, I remember, after I was elected in '92 and before I took office, and we got everybody down around the table at the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock and talked about this. Conventional economic wisdom was that if unemployment dropped much below 6 percent, you would have terrible inflation, the economy would be in bad shape, and we'd have to run it back up again. Well, the American people have proved that that's not so, through high levels of productivity and technology. But then you ask yourself, well, how can we keep this economy growing now that--if the national unemployment rate is down to 4.3 percent? How can we grow the economy without inflation? The obvious answer is, go to the places where the unemployment rate is still higher, where people will work for competitive wages, and where they can create markets because they do have money to spend if people invest it there. So, you see this also in Hispanic communities in places like Los Angeles, where we've put together a $400 million community development bank to go into these neighborhoods and make small loans to entrepreneurs to start businesses. You see it in these community development banks we've put up in New York and elsewhere. In New York City, the unemployment rate is still almost 9 percent, so obviously there is an enormous opportunity there for growth. And a lot of the unemployed people in New York are Hispanic, African-American, Asians, people from the Caribbean--not counted. So you go and you say, ``Well, make me a loan, and I'll go start this kind of business, and there are this thousand many people in my neighborhood and in my market area.'' And somebody picks up a census and says, ``No, there are not, there are only half that many.'' So this is a free enterprise issue as well, because I'm convinced that we have an opportunity that we've not had in 30 years to really crack the unemployment and the underemployment problem and the lack of business ownership in inner cities throughout this country. But to do it, even if you have generous and sympathetic bankers and a Government program that says you're supposed to target low-income areas, you've got to know what the market is. So it's a problem--the one you said is not just specific to you in here, it's a huge general problem throughout America that an accurate count would help. So it actually, I believe, would help us to keep the growth of the economy going and help us to lower the unemployment rate further by knowing where investment capital could flow. Let me just ask--and I guess I'd like to start with Dr. Klineberg because he started the Houston area survey--how possible do you think it is to get an accurate survey, and what do you think--what steps need to be taken? And what arguments do you think we could make to the skeptics who say no statistician with a computer can compete with people going around door-to-door and counting heads? This is a--you know, it's kind of like a--it's not an easy argument to win. You know, the average person, you just come up to somebody and say, ``We're here to figure out how many people are in this room. Would you think it would be better to have an expert look in the room and guess or have somebody walk up and down the rows and count?'' So we've got to figure out how to--we've got to win this argument with average American people who aren't used to thinking about these sort of things. And we have to prove that we can do it. So maybe we ought to talk about where we go from here. But, Doctor, would you like to say a few things? [Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology, Rice University, described how the census was used and why accuracy was important to the work of sociology and political science in understanding America at a time of great demographic change, from an amalgam of European nationalities to an amalgam of worldwide nationalities. Reverend Clemons commended the President for his support of statistical sampling, but urged collecting detailed data in the census.]”