Bill Clinton: “Well, let's talk about the downsizing of the military and the trade policy. The trade policy alone won't necessarily…”

“Well, let's talk about the downsizing of the military and the trade policy. The trade policy alone won't necessarily revive a place with a stagnant economy, because very often the trade policy increases jobs in the places that are already doing well, because success will build on success. So the only way it can help is if the people in the Mohawk Valley can identify companies that are going to have to expand because of expanding trade and try to get the expansions to locate there. But what I think is important--and I believe the United States, first of all, has an extra obligation to communities that have been adversely affected by military downsizing. And we have worked very hard to accelerate the rate at which we work with communities that have had military downsizing, to give them back the resources that they can use to rebuild their communities. In many places, we've had a lot of success; in some places we haven't. Secondly, I think it's important that in areas like yours the United States gives greater economic incentives for new investment to diversify the economy. One of the things that I have asked the Congress to do in my balanced budget plan is to more than double the number of empowerment zones and enterprise communities from the numbers we have now in the new plan, so we can give real incentives for people to invest their money and to create good, stable, long-term jobs in areas with high unemployment rates. If there's anything else you can think of I can do, I'll be happy to do it. If there's anything we should have done in the defense downsizing to benefit your area that we haven't done, I'll be happy to look into that. But I think the main thing we have to do at the national level is to keep the economy strong and then to create extra incentives for people--like people we're trying to move from welfare to work where I proposed some special incentives--or for places with high unemployment rates, so that we can more uniformly spread economic opportunity. When you see that America has a 5.2 percent unemployment rate, that's very misleading. We have a lot of States with unemployment rates below 4 percent now. We have within States a lot of communities with unemployment rates below 5.2 percent. But we still have places with unemployment rates of 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 percent. And so the trick is to create the economic incentives that will even out the investment patterns. And that's what I'm trying to do. And if you can think of anything specific I can do to help you, I hope you'll feel free to contact me and let me know. Thank you very much.”