Remarks at the employment initiative in Oakton, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 1, 1999

And that is very, very important. So we're going to seek new tax credits for businesses like the two that sponsored the alliance, which provide basic skills to their workers. And we will work to greatly expand the funding for basic adult education and high school completion programs.

You read all these stories about inner cities, where there are all these young single people, unemployed. Nearly all of them dropped out of high school. And it's going to be difficult to get some of them into some of the training programs we want unless we can get them to come back and finish high school, get their GED, and then go forward. And so this is a very, very important thing.

Secondly, I'm going to recommend a large new investment in the worker training system we revolutionized last year. You heard previous speakers mention it. But basically what we did was to take all these Government programs, 40 or 50 of them, collapse them into a single skills grant and one-stop shopping, so that if somebody is eligible right now for Federal help and training, instead of having to go to this program, that program, the other program, they go to one place, get a skills grant, and they can decide how to spend the money, where it is most likely to give them the training that will most likely give them a job.

But the program is underfunded today. It will not cover all the people who need it. So over the next 5 years I've asked for funds sufficient for us to be able to provide appropriate training and reemployment services for all Americans who lose their jobs - all Americans.

Now, next year we will increase the funding for skill grants, high-tech community career centers and rapid response teams by more than $360 million under our budget.

Third, I want to greatly increase our programs and our commitment to helping disadvantaged young people. We'll nearly double the funding for YouthBuild, an innovative program that gives young people a chance to learn construction skills to build homes for low-income families, on the job. We will double the funding for our GEAR UP program, one of my favorite programs; it's a mentoring and tutoring initiative I mentioned earlier, which involves sending college students out into middle schools to mentor students, to get them to both learn their lessons and stay in school but also to raise their sights and believe no matter how poor their circumstances, they can go on to college and do well. And it's a great program.

We are also going to continue our investments in what we call youth-opportunity areas, to try to go into these areas where there are a lot of kids just walking the streets, and there aren't any jobs, to try to get these kids off the streets - either back in the schools, or into jobs. If we cannot deal with the challenges faced by these young people now, with the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the first budget surplus in 30 years and the smallest percentage of the American people on welfare in 29 years, we will never get around to doing this. Now is the time for us to try to bring these young people into the mainstream of American life.