Bill Clinton: “You've begun to see comparable and, in some cases, relatively larger income gains in the lower 40 percent. I also think…”

“You've begun to see comparable and, in some cases, relatively larger income gains in the lower 40 percent. I also think the wage inequality is also reinforced by the fact that people at lower income levels are less able to buy stocks, and an enormous amount of increased wealth has come from ownership as opposed to just salaried employment. So you see a lot of the companies, for example, that offer their employees, even their lowest wage employees, stock options, something that Wal-Mart, for example, has done for a long time. Those companies will have a better record of increasing equality because their workers can afford wealth. And I think that that's important. The other thing is, of course, what you're here to talk to me about. The third point is that I think there are still disincentives to invest in the neighborhoods and communities or people which still need to be brought in. They're either real disincentives or they're imagined ones. There are, you know--we have these--I think there are accumulated preconceptions about where market opportunities exist and don't exist. And what I'm trying to do with--what I've been trying to do from the beginning of my administration with the empowerment zones and enterprise communities, with a vigorous Community Reinvestment Act--over $18.5 billion was loaned under the CRA in 1997, for example; that's the last year I have numbers for--with community development financial institutions, with the microenterprise lending, with all these initiatives, we've tried to remove the institutional barriers and create mechanisms which would allow capital to flow to people and to neighborhoods where they miss. We had the tax credits for hiring people off welfare or for hiring people that were in the empowerment zones or the enterprise communities. Those are things that have already had an impact. But what we're trying to do, what I'm trying to do now is to deal with what I think are both of the problems that have kept some of our inner-city neighborhoods and poorest communities from fully participating. That is, we have this new markets initiative, which is basically designed to put together a package of loan guarantees and tax credits to induce new investment in these areas at more attractive rates--and also the psychological barriers. We're going to take--we've got Sandy Weill and Hugh McColl and Dick Huber joining Republican and Democratic elected officials, and Jesse Jackson and Al From and, you know, all these people, to shine the light on the opportunity. You know, you've got a purchasing power gap over actual sales, retail sales, that averages 25 percent in urban areas throughout the country. It's 35 percent in Los Angeles and 40 percent in East St. Louis, two places we're going. Dick Huber actually made a kind of an interesting comment, only in jest, when we went to Atlanta to kind of kick off this program. He said, ``You know,'' he said, ``I may be the only guy that's kind of sorry you're doing this, because we figured out there's a huge opportunity out there and now all our competitors are going to know.'' [Laughter] New Markets Initiative Mr. Dunham. Well, that's one of the things that I was curious about. I mean, some of these corporations and executives--Citicorp, Aetna, NationsBank--have realized this. But at the same time, it seems to be uneven in the corporate community----”