Bill Clinton: “Well, I want to make two points about it and what's different about it this time. The first point is that today I issued…”

“Well, I want to make two points about it and what's different about it this time. The first point is that today I issued an Executive order which is legally binding on my Government, which requires all the tax increases and all the spending cuts to be spent on deficit reduction for the 5- year life of the budget. And that has the force of law. So if any of our people divert from that, they are breaking the law. The second thing is that if we miss the target in any given year, because it's impossible for any of us to calculate to the dollar what's going to happen to our enterprises for 5 years, any year we miss it I have to come back in with a plan to fix it. In addition to that, I told the House Members today that we were going to try to pass these requirements as a separate piece of legislation in September, and I feel confident we will. The Republicans essentially--we could have put it on the budget, but the Republicans in the Senate threatened to filibuster it if we did. I don't know why, because they were for it, I thought. Now, the other point I want to make about the spending cuts: There are three other opportunities we're going to have to cut spending to continue to drive the deficit down. Opportunity number one is in the health care debate. If we reform the health care system properly, over this decade we will spend less money on Medicare and Medicaid than we otherwise would. But if we do it right, then we'll be saving money for the private sector as well as the public sector. For example, we spend about 10 cents on the dollar in administering the health care system, because of all the various insurance and governmental regulations that no other country spends. We can do better. We can cut health care spending. Second, the Vice President has a reinventing Government report coming to me next month which will recommend a substantial amount of reorganization of the Government to eliminate both waste and corruption, that will bring us new savings. The Government is just like any other big company. It needs to go through a period of restructuring now. But this Government has not fundamentally been reexamined since Herbert Hoover's civil service report in the late fifties. So there will be more cuts coming there. The third thing I want to say, because I know there's a lot of skepticism about the Congress that you should know, that Congress will have further opportunities between now and September 30th to cut spending in the regular appropriations process. In other words, what this bill says is they have to cut at least this much spending, at least $255 billion. That's what this bill does. But they can cut more. The House of Representatives has already approved more than $10 billion in spending cuts over and above what we require and sent it on to the Senate. And I've been working for the last 2 days on trying to organize a Senate-House effort to continue to cut spending when this is over. So, we're just getting started. This is the first step, not the end of this road.”