Bill Clinton: “I think anything that comes out has to be a combination of agreement between the House and the Senate. It's hard to get…”

“I think anything that comes out has to be a combination of agreement between the House and the Senate. It's hard to get 218 House Members and 51 Senators to agree on anything that's tough. I mean, everybody can talk about cutting the deficit, but it's one thing to talk about it and quite another to do. But I think they'll be able to do it. No one was particularly happy with the form of the Btu tax, or very few people were, that passed the House, but everybody thought that Secretary Bentsen could come up with a plan that would make it good for the economy and could achieve what we were trying to do in terms of promoting domestic energy, and I think he did. The Senate preferred a tax that was a gas tax and a tax on some other fuels. It, at least, is small enough so that it is not particularly unfair to people in rural areas. It's not as big as what some had wanted, and certainly I did not want just a big old gas tax. I thought that was unfair. I also think it's important to point out in Texas, in light of the rhetoric in the recent political campaign, that it is simply not true that there is no spending cuts in this plan. There's $250 billion in spending cuts, and they affect everything. They affect agriculture and veterans and Medicare and the whole range of discretionary spending of the Government. They affect foreign aid; they affect defense. There are sweeping, broad-based spending cuts in this program. And the tax increases, two-thirds of them, fall on people with incomes above $200,000, three-quarters on people with incomes above $100,000. Families of four with incomes below $30,000 are held harmless, and people who work for a living 40 hours a week and have kids in the house who are now in poverty would actually be lifted above poverty by these tax changes in ways that promote the movement from welfare to work. So this is a fair and balanced plan. It was developed, and in a very aggressive way, by Lloyd Bentsen and by Leon Panetta, who used to be chairman of the House Budget Committee, to be fair, to have equal spending cuts in taxes, and to drive the deficit down so we could bring interest rates down. That's good for Texas, and that's good for everybody in America. And also, it leaves some room for investments that are critical to our future. And as you know, I support--you were implying this before I got on--I support the space station and the super collider projects because I think they're good for America's future. And if you're going to spend money on those things, you have to spend money on them. You can't play games; they do cost some money. Space Station and Super Collider Mr. Adler. Mr. President, how long can you guarantee that support for the super collider and the space station? Will they fall if that's the only way to meet your overall deficit reduction goal?”