Bill Clinton: “No. Let me back up and say first of all, the most important thing to me is that Congress engage in the same exercise I…”

“No. Let me back up and say first of all, the most important thing to me is that Congress engage in the same exercise I did and that I believe the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee tried to do, which is to say, what do we believe it will take to secure Medicare, provide a modest prescription drug benefit, these preventive changes, and all the modernization and competition things that I think we all agree need to be done? What will it take to do that? What does the Congress--even the Republicans are up there spending a lot of money. What about the money they're going to spend over and above the '97 balanced budget limits for education, for medical research, for the teaching hospitals, the inner-city hospitals, the therapeutic services? What about the veterans? Have they decided--what do they want to spend for defense? And we have to protect Social Security. Now after we do all that, then they ought to ask themselves what their revenue estimates or whatever revenue estimates they intend to use--what is left? And then that is how we ought to determine the size of the tax cut. We're doing this backwards. So you have this curious situation where the majority party is both passing a big tax cut and passing big spending bills without any sense of how this is going to be reconciled. So to me, the most important thing is that we engage in the same process, that we put first things first. Now, if we can agree on an amount, do I have to be flexible on how it's done? Of course I do; they have more votes than we do. Even the Democrats in Congress had a different plan than I did, and I thought they had some good ideas. The most important thing is that we engage in a process that saves Social Security and Medicare, that pays the debt off, and that continues to invest in education, defense, and the things we have to invest in. Then I think we ought to give whatever's left back to the American people in a tax cut. I obviously will argue for the fairest possible way. I mean, if you look at the tax cut they adopted, the top one percent get 25 percent, the bottom 81 percent get 25 percent. So I think that, you know, 75 percent of the benefits go to the top 20 percent of the people. I think that there are problems with it, but I'm--clearly we'd have to negotiate the content, the details. But the amount should be determined not by politics but by arithmetic and by what we agree on in Medicare and the investments we agree to make in our country's future and our education and defense and the environment and by what we have to spend for the agriculture, for the veterans, for the problems that are now out there with the teaching hospitals, the inner-city hospitals, the therapy services have been canceled, those kinds of things. We need to find out what we are going to do and what we have to do and what is right for the long-term interest of America, and then we can have the short-term tax cut. And let me just make one other point about that, as we celebrate 300,000 more jobs and finally breaking the 19 million job barrier. We have seen warning after warning after warning in the business press in the last 2 weeks that a big tax cut in the face of this growing economy would be viewed as an inflationary measure which would cause the markets to raise interest rates, which would turn right around and take the benefits away from ordinary Americans that they get from tax cuts. If you get a tax cut today and the tax cut causes higher home mortgage rates, higher car payment rates, higher interest--credit card rates, higher college loan rates, and a weaker economy, then it won't take long for that tax cut to disappear in the flash of an eye. And that's another thing that ought to be considered here. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Inflation”