Bill Clinton: “Well, I think that we will point the way toward eliminating it altogether. And let me explain what I mean by that.…”

“Well, I think that we will point the way toward eliminating it altogether. And let me explain what I mean by that. Chairman Greenspan and I have discussed this at great length, and we discussed whether there was an analogy here to what Japan did from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties when they had a comparable operating deficit to ours. And they took it down to zero and actually began to run a surplus. But they took, as I recall, somewhere between 9 and 11 years to do it. I can't remember exactly. But I saw a chart in one of the papers here represented, I just can't remember which one, which showed how long they took. I believe that in order to move the deficit down beyond where it is now, if you look at it, it's clear what you have to do. You have to pass a health reform plan that brings health care costs in line with inflation plus population growth. That's what you have to do. If you go back and look at this budget, if you look at discretionary domestic spending, it's flat for 5 years now. That is, everything we increase in education, in technology, in defense conversion, we cut in some other area. Defense goes down. The only thing that's really going up in this budget besides cost-of-living increases for Social Security and much more modest pay increases for military and civilian employees, is a 9 percent increase in health care costs, which is down from the projected 12 percent per year increase in the budget before I took office. So Greenspan is right. If you want to get this deficit down, the next thing is to bring health care costs down to inflation plus population. The other point I would make is there is the chance that this deficit reduction will be greater than we think because of lower interest rates, if we can keep them down long and if we can have good economic growth. I noticed the other day in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a lot of budget analysts were interviewed on the validity of this plan, and the one for Price Waterhouse said that this was the most honest budget plan presented to the Congress in more than a decade, and the only thing I might be off on is it might well produce more deficit reduction. So we just don't know. Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr.”