Bill Clinton: “If you create more than 8 million jobs in your first term, and we get this unemployment rate much below 6 percent, we'll…”

“If you create more than 8 million jobs in your first term, and we get this unemployment rate much below 6 percent, we'll have inflation. The Fed will have to really raise interest rates; it'll break the back of the recovery. And I argued to the contrary because of two things. I thought if we had open markets and maximized the impact of technology, that it would tend to dramatically increase productivity and hold down prices, and of course, you know, that's what's happened. And all over the country today, if you look at the most sophisticated labor unions, you don't see a bunch of strikes here, because we're having good times. People are saying, we remember the bad times; we know we're in the global economy; we want wage increases; but we want them to be consistent with the profitability and the productivity of the firm we're in. It's very interesting. There's a whole--and I think part of this is reinforced by the fact that all the worker pension funds are in the market, and you know, there are a lot of reasons for all this. But I think that what's happened is we're now down to unemployment below 4.5 percent, with no substantial inflation. We've had some oil spikes and other spikes, but basically things are rocking along here. But now we've reached a point where people are saying, ``Well, at this level of labor force participation, is there a way to continue to grow the economy without sending inflation up so much that the Fed will have to raise interest rates, and we'll break it?'' So as a pure economic perspective--and I have argued repeatedly that there are only three options here--you either have to find new markets abroad, which I strongly favor, and I'm still working on trying to get our party together on a trade position; that's option one. Option two is to take discrete but dispersed populations that are out of the labor force and bring them in. That's still people on welfare, but the welfare rolls have been cut in half, so the ones left are the hardest to place and the disabled. And we're going to do that; presumably, we are going to have a big bipartisan agreement on that, to let them keep their Medicaid health insurance when they come in. I don't think you went to New Hampshire with me when I did the forum on this, but there's this former Olympic skier in New Hampshire who is now confined to a wheelchair, and I think he's quadriplegic. Anyway--but he's seriously injured. He's got $40,000 in Medicaid bills. But he's got a job and makes $30,000 a year. You and I as taxpayers, we're going to pay the Medicaid bills regardless, so we're better off with him making $30,000, and it's a better society with people like that working. So you can do that. Mr. Brownstein. That's the second way?”