Bill Clinton: “It's almost like a tale of two Congresses. The first one, Congress was one of the most productive in modern history. And…”

“It's almost like a tale of two Congresses. The first one, Congress was one of the most productive in modern history. And it occurred mostly but not entirely last year, where we adopted a new economic plan which reversed trickle-down economics, brought the deficit down, asked the wealthiest 1.2 percent of our people to pay higher tax rates but lowered taxes on about 15 percent of our working families, 15 million people. We brought the deficit down dramatically 3 years in a row for the first time since Mr. Truman was President because of that economic plan, with $255 billion worth of tax cuts--I mean, spending cuts and cuts in over 300 Government programs. Last year produced a dramatic expansion of trade with NAFTA and with the GATT agreement we got, which the Congress hasn't passed yet, but they will after the election. They'll come back and pass that. The third thing we tried to do was to increase investment in people and technology, and the Congress did a good job of that. We put 200,000 more kids in Head Start. We're going to immunize 2 million children under the age of 2 by 1996. We passed a bill called Goals 2000 to have national world-class standards education for our classes, but have more local control of the schools at the same time. We passed a bill to improve apprenticeships in every State, so that more kids could leave high school and go to work and get good jobs if they didn't go to college. Perhaps the most important thing we did was we reformed the student loan program and made 20 million people eligible for lower interest student loans at longer repayment. And we, of course, passed national service, which allows young people to earn college credit by doing community service or earn money to go to college. So that was very, very good. We passed this crime bill after 6 years of haggling. And it's very tough in terms of ``three strikes and you're out'' and 100,000 more jail cells and 100,000 more police on the street. But it also has some good prevention programs that give our kids something to say yes to, drug treatment, drug education, job training, wholesome and constructive community-based recreation programs. So that was very good. With this reinventing Government initiative, it's been astonishing. We're reducing the size of the Federal Government to its smallest point since Kennedy was President. That's something Republican conservatives always said they were for, but we did that. Ms. Ratner. When I talk about it on talk radio, people say it doesn't happen. I mean, why doesn't this message sink in?”