Bill Clinton: “They could, but there's a serious factual problem, if that's the total slant on it, which is the experience of Germany…”

“They could, but there's a serious factual problem, if that's the total slant on it, which is the experience of Germany before the East was integrated into it. That is, if you split out East Germany from West Germany and you look just at the unemployment rate in West Germany for the last year or two, you'll see that's the only country in Europe with an unemployment rate as low as ours. Ours is too high. And their is too high, but theirs is much lower than all the other European countries. And yet they have very high costs in terms of mandatory vacations, in terms of mandatory worker retraining, in terms of general education investment in workers, in terms of mandatory health care coverage. Although their health care is much less expensive than ours, all employers have to undertake it. So it's a hard case to make in the case of Germany where they have rather high labor costs and manufacturing wage costs, higher than the United States on average, terrifically productive workers, and they have managed to keep their unemployment fairly low. Now their overall unemployment is higher because of the very high unemployment in East Germany. So we're going to have to be a little more sophisticated than that. I mean, there are some things that may add to unemployment or may prohibit job creation and some that aren't. Bosnia”