Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California - Bill Clinton's speech, May 18, 1993

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 24, 1993

Voter Registration

Q. I'm a 29-year-old returning student. And I didn't know if you knew, but we are the number one voter registration campus in southern California, LAVC is. I wanted to know, will you support an amendment to your motor voter bill which will allow students to register to vote at the same time they register for classes when they come here to school?

The President. The answer to that is, I support that concept, but it's too late to amend that bill, because we had to fight like crazy just to get it through. You know, it was filibustered once by the minority in the Senate. And finally, we got an agreement and passed the bill, the motor voter bill, after it was passed last year and then vetoed. So it's a great improvement over the present law, the motor voter bill, and so I think that it's unrealistic to think we can amend it.

Now, what I think--as a matter of fact, I want to get it up and sign it before anybody decides to do anything else with it. But what I think you should do, since California has such an incredible array of community colleges and other institutions of higher education, is to try to get a State bill through requiring that to be done here. I mean, that's what I think you should do. I'll bet you could get a lot of help.

And also, I think that the local registrar of voters would probably be happy to do it. And if they're reluctant, then you ought to pursue trying to get a State law passed.

Home Ownership

Q. Mr. President, I still believe in having the American dream. And one of those dreams is to have an education. Another one is to own a home. And I want to know, what do you have in your economic policy that would help me buy a home?

The President. The most important thing that I could do to help you buy a home is to keep the cost of buying a home low. And the best way to do that is to keep interest rates down. Home mortgage rates have been at 20-year lows, 20-year lows. And I want you to understand why. I hope we can keep them down there.

First, interest rates dropped for a long time because of the recession, but they still were pretty high. Then, after the election, I said we were going to bring this deficit down, and I gave a specific outline of how I was going to do it. The rates started dropping rather dramatically.

Last year, a poll was done which said that only 47 percent of the American people under the age of 35 thought they had a real good chance to own their own home. This year, a poll was done that said 74 percent of the people thought they had a chance to own their own home. The only thing that's changed is that the cost of financing a home has gone way down. So the central premise of what we're trying to do in bringing this deficit down is to lower interest rates, lower home mortgage rates, lower credit card rates, lower business rates, lower the car payment rates so that we can help make these things more affordable to average citizens. In other words, doing the right thing for all Americans will help individual Americans more than any specific program I could have on home-buying.