Youth Employment and Training Programs Remarks Announcing a New Initiative.

It seems this is the first audience I've addressed in 2 months where there were smiles on the faces— [laughter] —more than expressions of concern.

I am very grateful to all of you for being here and for letting your presence be witness to the importance of the announcements that we will make this afternoon. I know that many Members of the Congress have been deeply involved, as have I, in assessing one of the most serious threats to our Nation, to the interrelationship among our people, to the enhancement of opportunities that confront all of us to have realized for those who've been deprived in the past.

These have, indeed, been difficult weeks for our Nation, since November 4, in particular, and exacerbated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan beginning on Christmas Eve.

We live in a free society. Our Nation supports human freedom throughout the world. We live in human dignity, in human aspirations for the preservation of peace for our own people and for people all over the Earth.

We are outraged when we see our own citizens kidnaped and abused in Iran, and we are also outraged when we see in Afghanistan the independence of that nation and the freedom of their people destroyed by the invading force of a superpower. I'm convinced that our Nation and those who stand with us will prevail in. this time of testing, because we, collectively, are strong and because we, collectively, are right.

Americans have been united in recent weeks, perhaps as never before in recent history. We faced a common threat, and we faced it as one people. That unity, that persistence, that competence, that reasoned determination has been our real strength. It is, to a very large extent, responsible for the broad international support, an almost unprecedented degree of international support, which we continue to enlist. As you know from experience, it's not always been the case—in the United Nations, among the nonaligned countries, among the developing nations, among the small nations, those whose populations are primarily black or brown or yellow—that our country and our position has had such strong support.

The announcement that I make today is important. But I want to ask you to join with me, not in confronting a common enemy from overseas, but in sharing today a common hope. The announcement that I make today will strengthen our Nation. It will strengthen our Nation's life internally, yes, just as the steps that I have announced recently will also strengthen our own security and keep us at peace.

Announcements, if they have substance and if they have meaning, can never be easy to accomplish. The facing of a challenge, the answering of a question, the meeting of a need, the overcoming of an obstacle, which is important, is never easy.

All of you are idealists. If you hadn't been, if you weren't, you would not be here. You have dreams for our country. You believe in America, not just what it presently is but what it hopes to be and what it can be. You believe in the full promise of our country, the land of equal justice and the land of equal opportunity for people without regard to their race or their color or the wealth or influence of their family or their place or the status of their birth. This has never been an easy thing to achieve. The hope with which we face it has sometimes been a burning, vivid, all-consuming hope. Sometimes we have accepted the status quo in a quiescent state.

Today I'm launching a major initiative that will bring that great promise of America, the land of equal opportunity, to a closer relationship with actual reality. I intend to ask the Congress in the weeks ahead to make a historic investment in our Nation's most precious, most underused natural resource, national resource, human resource—the energies, the talents, and the aspirations of America's young people.

The initiative I'm proposing will be substantial. Together With efforts already begun, it will constitute the most comprehensive youth employment and training program ever accomplished or envisioned in our Nation. It will involve a new Federal commitment of $2 billion in expenditures by fiscal year 1982. This will bring to more than $6 billion, in all, the Federal investment in this unprecedented public and private effort.

This is indeed a sizeable investment, but it's one that's amply justified. I can reveal a secret to you this afternoon. Our 1981 fiscal year budget will be a tight budget. [Laughter] But I'm convinced that this particular investment, which has not been a penurious or reluctant commitment on my part or those of my advisers, is an investment in our Nation's future which we need to make and which we need to make now.

We need it for economic reasons, because every dollar we invest in the talent or ability of our young people is a dollar invested in our Nation's economic future. We need to make it for moral reasons and 'for ethical reasons. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. We've all heard this compelling appeal by the United Negro College Fund: A mind is a terrible thing to waste. We've seen its television portrayal of a young man, sitting alone in an empty room, listening helplessly to the sounds of the city outside, a world in which he cannot hope to compete. We see him paralyzed, not in a physical sense, but by a lack of skill, a lack of hope.

Too many young Americans are today afflicted by this exact kind of manmade paralysis. Some have already left school, but they lack the skills and experience to join a productive work force. Others are still in school, but lack the training and employment opportunities that will ever lead them to hopeful careers when they finish their education.

We're not talking here about temporary unemployment, the kind we expect most young people to experience as they go from young adulthood into permanent adult status in life. We are talking about the permanently unemployed, sometimes even the second or third generation of the permanently unemployed, young people who are coming of age, who are headed toward a dead end, an entire adulthood of unemployment.

It would be difficult for any of us sitting in this room to know what that means. I can't claim to know fully what it means. I only have one life to live that God has given me, and if I were 18 or 19 or 20 years old and was convinced that my life would never have any productive meaning, that I could never support myself economically, that I could never hope to have a viable family, dependent upon my ability and my initiative and my industry to support it, it would be a constantly debilitating, depressive characteristic in my life.

These millions of young Americans, in their late teens and early twenties, have come to form a whole segment of our society, a class of people without any productive role in our economy, without purpose and without hope. They include blacks, and they include Hispanics. In fact, they include every single ethnic group in this country. They live in rural communities; they also live in cities. The existence of this kind of mass hopelessness and frustration is both intolerable and unacceptable.

From the time I took office, I've been determined to meet this challenge head on, of youth unemployment. In 1977 in my first year in office, I worked with many of you to get through Congress and finally was able to sign the Youth Unemployment and Demonstration Projects Act, the most far-reaching measure devoted to this noble purpose in the history of the world. This has already given employment and training opportunities to 750,000 young people, 300,000 of them minority youth.

The jobs created for this program just for the black teenagers—by this program just for black teenagers—added up to 75 percent of the entire nationwide increase in black youth employment last year. That percentage demonstrates very vividly not only the dimensions of what we've accomplished but also the scope of the massive task which we still confront.

Nine months ago, as almost all of you know, I asked Vice President Mondale to head up a special White House task force on the problem of youth unemployment. Since then we have completed the fullest study of its kind ever undertaken. We've held regional hearings throughout the country. We've talked to business leaders, to civil rights leaders, to employment leaders, to labor leaders, to educators, to local officials, and we've talked to a lot of young people themselves, those who've been successful in overcoming the handicap of unemployment and those who have or had given up hope of ever overcoming the crippling effect of unemployment.

We've had to make some hard judgments about the gravity of the challenge and about what we must do to meet it. One of the difficulties has been just to admit that the embarrassing statistics might be accurate, because many of us who participated in this study are at least partially responsible for the situation as it exists.

We've found, for instance, that there are 2 million high school students in lower income school districts alone who are at least 2 years behind in their basic skills-reading, writing, and computation-skills that are taken for granted in today's job market. And I need not tell you that the 2-year measurement is much better than many of these young people's educational level demonstrates. A large number of high school graduates in the United States of America are still functionally illiterate. They cannot read or write. They cannot add or subtract well enough to hold a simple job.

There's another, second large group of disadvantaged young people—also, coincidentally, about 2 million—who are already out of school, but having severe problems getting a job, and if they ever get a job, holding a job. This problem, as you know, is particularly severe among minority youth. While 67 of every 100 white people in nonpoverty areas have jobs, only 35 percent of black youth living in poor neighborhoods can find employment.

Both groups, those still in school and those who have already left school, are in an important period of transition—in effect, from childhood to adulthood. They are at a point where they can either take off and find meaningful jobs and have a productive life and have self-satisfaction and self-esteem and be part of society and contribute to the structural strength of America, or they can drop out into a lifetime of hopelessness and alienation, where their inclination is to tear down the structure of American society because they feel so removed from it and because many of them feel that they are victims of it instead of the beneficiaries of it.

I'm announcing today a set of initiatives that will reach both these groups: those still in school, those already out. To begin with, I'm going to put some muscle behind the programs that already are in existence and which are working. I'm proposing that we increase the resources devoted to youth education, training, and employment programs by $2 billion: $1.2 billion in our new budget and $800 million more in fiscal year 1982, as the new programs take hold. And if we can exceed our projected accomplishments, then I will certainly not hesitate to increase the amount of money that I propose in the next budget that I prepare later on this year.

I am proposing that these funds be divided roughly between those still in school and those who've left school. For those out of school, either as dropouts or as graduates, the money will finance work experience, training, and job counseling. It will finance opportunities for 450,000 young people whom we are not reaching now.

These employment and training programs will emphasize tough performance standards. For too many years, we have tended to look at our youth employment program simply as a way of keeping our young people off the streets. I'm determined to build programs that are effective, well-designed, well-managed, and demanding—demanding on the employer and also demanding on the employee. These programs will be tough; they will not be easy to get through, but every young man or woman who gets through them will have a reason to look back on their experience and to be proud. And the young person will have a work record to use where it counts—that is, on the job market to acquire a permanent possibility for employment.

For those who are still in school, I'm requesting funds to provide basic education and employment skills for some 1 million students in our country's 3,000 poorest urban and rural school districts. This program will also provide many of these students with part-time work while they are still enrolled in school, work that will be linked very closely with the learning that they are getting in the school classroom. The goal will be to encourage students who might otherwise drop out to stay in school and to get the preparation they need, along with the work experience, so that the outside world of employment won't be such a strange environment, a fearful environment for them.

I know that I will have your support in getting this program enacted and funded. I know I can count on those of you from the private sector on whom we will have to rely very heavily—employers, unions, educators, and community based organizations—to play your indispensable role. This program will work only with public and private cooperation, and I know we will receive it.

To repeat myself, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. So is energy—not just the kind that powers automobiles or generates electricity, but the kind that makes people eager to learn and eager to work and eager to strengthen the structure of a democratic society, and the kind of energy that young people have in so much abundance. Dreams are also a terrible thing to waste. We cannot let the dreams of our young people die. As the American poet Langston Hughes once wrote, "Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die life is a brokenwinged bird that cannot fly." We will hold on to our dreams so that others can hold on to theirs. We will hold on to our dreams so that together we can make this great country of ours a land of boundless hope and opportunity for everyone.

Thank you very much.