Bill Clinton: “Well, I don't want to be too presumptuous, since I've never attended one before. I've only read about them before. You…”

“Well, I don't want to be too presumptuous, since I've never attended one before. I've only read about them before. You know, I always followed them very closely. But what we are striving for--I think the other leaders agree with me, including those like Chancellor Kohl, who's been to many of these. My own view is there ought to be enough time at these G-7 meetings for a serious discussion among the leaders without a lot of bureaucratic procedures and rules and regulations about these big issues. What about the crisis in the wealthy countries creating jobs? What can we do to create more jobs? How do you explain the fact that France, for example--let's take France. France had a productivity growth rate that was the highest in Europe in some of the years of the late eighties and still had relatively high unemployment. The United States, which has far fewer labor supports than most of the European countries do, still has difficulty getting its unemployment rate below 7 percent. We're well into 2 years after the worst of our recession, and yet we are 3 million jobs behind where we would ordinarily be at this point after a recession. We should discuss these things, and we should think about whether we can learn things from one another about how to create jobs in the west. We should be able to really talk through very frankly what the political and other economic barriers are to getting the GATT done and really think about it and talk about it. It's far more important than what's in the specific words of the communique, whether we come out of there with some sort of commitment to do something, to take action, and to move. And finally, I think we ought to really focus on how our individual economic strategies may not work as well unless we are coordinated. Let me just give you one example. I'm trying to do something that our country has not done before. We are trying to dramatically cut our Government deficit at a time when our economic growth is slow. Traditional economic theory would say if you have a sluggish economy, you don't cut spending and raise taxes; you might do the reverse, right? Why am I trying to do that? Because we're in a global economy, and the United States deficit caused an imbalance in the global economy, okay? But now, this can work for us for a while just on our own, because we had so much debt in the 1980's accumulated at high interest rates, by bringing down the deficit, interest rates in America have dropped very low. So businesses and homeowners are going out now and refinancing their debt, and that puts a lot of new money into our economy. So I can get a little bit of growth just on what we do here. But in the end, this will only work if there is an expansionary policy in Japan, if Europe is able to resume a higher level of growth so that the system is brought into balance, because what we do has a complementary action in the rest of the G-7. So these are the things, it seems to me, that really matter. And that's why I think these G-7 meetings can really make a difference. But I think that if we get all hung up on--you know, we all have to have these prepared statements, and we're afraid we're going to say one word out of the way or make one little mistake which makes a huge headline in some country. And then we've got to have every little word right in these communiques. I think that's just--that takes a lot of time and energy away from what we should be doing, which is focusing on how we can make the lives of our people better and fulfill our responsibilities as leaders of the world. U.S. Leadership”