Bill Clinton: “Well, they are beginning to get better here, and they're beginning to get better here basically for two reasons. First…”

“Well, they are beginning to get better here, and they're beginning to get better here basically for two reasons. First off, American industry was really battered here during the entire 1980's and in fact starting back in the mid-seventies. And there has been a determined effort by people running our firms in the private sector to become more competitive, so a lot of them are. And that increased productivity, increasing output per worker, the increasing ability to compete with countries around the world, that is helping things to get better. The second thing that's making things better is that this administration's serious effort to bring the deficit down has helped long-term interest rates to get down to their lowest rate in 20 years, and that's leading people to refinance, freeing up some money, and we're getting some more investment. But I don't want to mislead anybody. This is still going to be a very tough road back. If you look at southern California, if you look at Connecticut, if you look at some of the States that have been hit especially hard by defense cutbacks of all kinds and other economic problems, we're still going to have to have a very disciplined plan to invest and grow our way out of the problems of the last few years. But yes, we're in better shape now than Europe and Japan. In fact, if we could get some more growth in those countries, we'd be in better shape because we're not selling as much to them as we would be because of their economic problems. They don't have the money to buy American products. And when I go to Japan in a couple of weeks to talk to the leaders of Europe and Japan, one of the things we're going to be talking about is that America is doing what they asked us to do; we're bringing our deficit down. And we want the Europeans to bring their interest rates down and the Japanese to invest some more money in their economy so they can grow it, because they don't have the deficit we do. And if we can work together, we can grow the world economy and that means jobs for America. But you're quite right, we're actually in better shape than Japan and Europe is right now, except for unemployment rates. Japan's still got a lower unemployment rate than we do. Mr. Jackson. Mr. President, thank you very, very much indeed for this, sir.”