Bill Clinton: “Well, to speed it up where it's underway and to kick it off where it's not. We still have, believe it or not, we still…”

“Well, to speed it up where it's underway and to kick it off where it's not. We still have, believe it or not, we still have got a lot of counties in this country where the unemployment rate is over 10 percent, and a lot more where the unemployment rate is over 7.5 percent. So what I try to do, first of all, is to vigorously support the Community Investment Act, setting up more community financial institutions, expanding enterprise zones, which the Vice President has run for us so well over the last 6 years. But what I want to do now is try to mobilize the business community and set up a legal framework that would give an incentive in every area of the country which has not felt the prosperity to grow more quickly. So I've sent this legislation up last week which would essentially give business people the same incentives to invest in developing communities in America that they get to invest in developing communities in Central America or the Caribbean or Africa or Asia. I don't want to take those away; I just want to have the same incentives in America in the Mississippi Delta, in Appalachia, in the Indian reservations, the inner cities. And we have this terrific interest in the business community now, I think partly because they feel they're prosperous and they can do it and they ought to do it. But I want to emphasize, this is not a social program. This is a conviction of mine that there is profit to be made in these areas where unemployment is too high and underemployment is too high and there is too little investment. Ms. Gharib. But I'm sure you've heard this before, where people will say, ``Look, we've tried this before. We've tried tax credits. It's difficult.''”