Bill Clinton: “If I could just interject here, the general title of what she's talking about, getting very small loans to start…”

“If I could just interject here, the general title of what she's talking about, getting very small loans to start businesses, is microenterprise loans. For many years our Government--which believe it or not only spends one percent of your tax dollars on foreign aid, contrary to popular belief. We have the smallest foreign aid program as a percentage of our budget of any advanced government in the world, but we have gotten a lot out of it, because, among other things, there's a country in Central America where, a few years ago, in cooperation with some American religious groups that were operating development programs, we put $1 million into a small loan program. The average loan program was $300. Now, in that country, in terms of the per capita income it would probably be about, say, a $2,000 loan here; that would be about the equivalent. But anyway, over the next few years that $1 million generated enough business loans to create 43,000 jobs, which is one percent of the total employment in that country. Everybody paid the loans back with interest. There's now $4 million in that account that started off at $1 million. My premise is, if we can do that in another country, we ought to do that in our country, and that in the inner cities, in these very isolated rural areas where the per capita income is low and the unemployment rate is high, I believe we should be making those kinds of loans. So we have--another part of our economic outreach to small business was a fund called the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, CDFI. And if it survives this budget round, what we're going to try to do is to get banks to establish themselves with branches in areas where there's very high unemployment, low per capita income, and make these kinds of loans to try to set up businesses. They can also make conventional small-business loans as well. But I think for a little bit of money, you can do a huge amount. We established a bank like that in a rural part of my State when I was Governor, and my wife went on the board of the bank, and we modeled it after the only American project I know of, which was a bank in Chicago which helped to redevelop the south side of Chicago by making small loans to individual carpenters, individual electricians, individual builders, and then they went in and took all this decrepit housing, rebuilt it, and got middle class people and poor people to live together, and totally turned around a neighborhood. So I'm glad to hear you say that, because there's not enough Government money to rescue the inner cities and the isolated rural areas, but free enterprise could do it if we did it in this way. You're the first citizen that had never had a direct contact with this program overseas that ever suggested it, but it looks to me like if we're financing small businesses in another country like--we ought to do it here in our country. We ought to give the Americans the same break that other people have. Thank you. [A participant voiced her concern that States and local businesses could not afford to support the arts and asked if the Federal Government could help.]”