Bill Clinton: “Well, the answer is I'm prepared to do nearly anything to put everybody to work. But let me say again the country with…”

“Well, the answer is I'm prepared to do nearly anything to put everybody to work. But let me say again the country with the lowest unemployment rate of all the wealthy countries in the world is Japan. And it would be hard to make a serious case that they have a low unemployment rate because their Government's not involved in their economy. And basically what they have is high productivity for exports and labor-intensive, even not very productive protections for the domestic market, so they can keep unemployment low. It's an interesting system. I'm not suggesting we follow it; I don't think we should. The only point I'm trying to make is that a number of the business leaders who come to see me believe that one of the reasons that we have unemployment as high as it is, is that we had nothing to substitute for the big cutback in defense spending. For example, when Eisenhower was President, we built the interstate highway network. And then we had in the seventies, we had a huge investment in building new water and sewer systems, making environmental investments that had never been made before. And then in the eighties, we had a huge investment in defense industries of all kinds, not just people in the military but all the contractors. So my feeling is, what we need to do is to get the Government out of those things where the private sector is doing well and doing better. And I think, as I said, I'm really eagerly awaiting the work the Vice President is doing. He's consulting experts from all over America on what we can do to increase the productivity of the Federal Government. I think the Government does a lot of things that hold back the job engine in the private sector. But there are also some things that Government does well that we're not doing now as much as so many of our competitors are. For example, if you wanted to have a more efficient high-speed rail network in this country, you'd have to have some sort of public input here, just like they do in every other country. So I think the problem is, we're doing too little of some of the things we do well, and we're doing too much of things that we can't really have much of an impact on except to slow down the job machine. And it's not so much less; we need a lot less in some areas, but we also need to far more sharply define what nearly all of us could agree the Government ought to do as well as what the Government ought not to do. And we're going to have to be much more disciplined about it. I mean, there are lots of departments here in this town that have a good mission. But they also are doing things that they started doing 25 or 30 years ago that may or may not have a credible rationale for continuing now, and we can't afford that anymore. It's just like you. If you want to increase your impact, and you're not getting any more money, you've got to change what you're doing. You've got to stop doing some things, and you want to start doing others. And the thing I like about this budget that we're about to adopt is that if we want to do new things, it's going to require us to stop doing some old things and will require some real discipline for the first time in a long time. And we'll do our best. And if we set up this consultation process, you can help us along the way. Thank you very much.”