JOBLESSNESS among young men and women today is the bitter root of tomorrow's poverty. While unemployment among young workers has always been higher than among the the more mature, it has been worsening in recent years. Almost 1 million young men and women are today without work. The unemployment rate for teenagers is 18 percent.
I am especially concerned about the plight of those young people who are growing into adulthood in areas of poverty and depression. There unemployment is not just a temporary hiatus between school and work. It is too often the beginning of an enduring disqualification from opportunity. It is a turning onto a road that leads nowhere. Lack of skill, language difficulty, ignorance of work discipline, and poor academic backgrounds enforce discrimination's hand. The result is a generation without a future.
The program announced today is the latest and one of the most promising in a variety of efforts we are making to bring opportunity to neighborhoods where it has long been absent. The road before us is long, but it lessens with each step. The Mobilization for Youth program has my deep interest and support.
Note: The statement was read by the Press Secretary to the President, George E. Reedy, at his news conference held at the White House at 11:16 a.m. on July 8, 1964.
The Press Secretary stated that the program was developed to provide training for some 2,000 unemployed, out-of-school, and disadvantaged youth in New York City's Lower East Side area. It was to be financed by funds from the Ford Foundation and from the Federal Government under the Manpower Development and Training Act, and to be operated by Mobilization For Youth, a nonprofit organization formed in 1962 to combat delinquency and youth unemployment.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Statement by the President on New York City's Mobilization for Youth Program. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239039