Bill Clinton: “Well, first let me say, I definitely agree that the investment the United States has made in times past in international…”

“Well, first let me say, I definitely agree that the investment the United States has made in times past in international educational exchanges and bringing people to our country to attend our universities and our colleges and sending our young people abroad to attend school in other countries has been a very, very important thing. It is true that there has been some reduction in Federal support for such programs, which I very much regret, but it is a function of the fact that we quadrupled the national debt of America from 1981 to 1993, that in a 12-year period we exploded our debt, our Government deficit was high, and we started having to cut back on a lot of investments, including things that we wanted to do. I will say that most of our major universities now, particularly a lot of our State universities, are investing much more of their money and their effort in trying to recruit students from around the world and to promote these sort of educational exchanges. And what I would need to do before I could make a final judgment is to see what the total effort is in our country. But we should be doing more of it. So I feel very strongly about that. Now, what was the second question you asked? Yes, yes, the economy and politics. Let me just say about that, I believe that the business of politics is, not completely but in large measure, to give the maximum opportunity for the positive economic forces in the world to succeed within each country or within each--in my case, within each of our States within our country. That is not the whole business, but that is a major part of the business. So a lot of what we try to do in the United States is to think about the good things that are happening in our country and in the world and what we can do to accelerate them and then to think about the problems, the roadblocks, the obstacles, and what we can do to eliminate them so that we try to harmonize those things. Very often when politics can mess up economics, it's because it becomes obsessed with some other goal which is destructive of the human spirit. Politics should be more than economics--I talked about human rights here today--but it should be very heedful of making those good things happen through the economic system. I'll take this lady's question, the last one. WTO and President's Visit to Istiqlal”