Shortly after the Clinton Presidential Center opened in Little Rock in 2004, former President Bill Clinton made a trip to Ghana in West Africa to talk with government officials.
While there, he spoke to a crowd of more than 1 million, the largest he had ever addressed, Clinton told more than 1,300 people Thursday at the 149th annual meeting of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce.
As he walked to his airplane to leave Ghana, a woman shouted at him not to leave. She ran up to Clinton and told him that because of an act that lowered American tariffs on African products passed during Clinton's administration, she and hundreds of other Ghanaian women had jobs.
"I am one of 400 women who have a job for the first time in our lives, making shirts," she told Clinton. And all of their children were in school for the first time, she told Clinton.
"So, here's your shirt," she said.
"She was much better off than she had been and her kids had a better chance," Clinton told the chamber members. "That's what people want everywhere. Most people just want a decent chance."
That's what this country needs, Clinton said. The economy today is unlike the economy in the 1990s, he said. Information technology was just beginning to take off. And the nation's roads and bridges are in much worse shape now than they were 20 years ago, Clinton said.
Clinton said he favors overhauling the corporate tax structure to lower the rate that companies pay when they repatriate foreign income. Taxes paid on the repatriated revenue could then be directed to road and bridge work.
A bill currently before Congress would accomplish that, he said.
"We're all going to have to be really creative about how we create an economy with enough shared prosperity to keep the whole consumer base going," Clinton said.
A separate program from the Clinton Global Initiative has generated more than $10 billion to pay for renovations of buildings to make them more energy efficient, Clinton said. Only $1.5 billion of that money has been spent, but it has created about 33,500 jobs, Clinton said.
"In all of the energy area, investments in efficiencies give you the highest rate of return on job creation," Clinton said.
Clinton has been a great ambassador for Arkansas, Kenny Hall, executive vice president of the state Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview after Clinton's speech.
"He made important comments about the need to create jobs and to expand workforce education," Hall said.
French Hill, recently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Arkansas' 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses central Arkansas, said he appreciated Clinton's comments about achieving shared prosperity.
"The president also made some excellent remarks about the impact of his library on Little Rock," Hill said. "He also had some important things to say about the work of his foundation not only in the U.S. but around the world."
Clinton's library has had an economic effect of about $2.5 billion in construction projects alone in downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock since opening in 2004, according to a study on the economic impact of the center commissioned by the Little Rock chamber.
Business on 12/05/2014