Bill Clinton: “No, but it'll probably happen anyway. [Laughter] That is, it will be fair to give the administration and those who voted…”

“No, but it'll probably happen anyway. [Laughter] That is, it will be fair to give the administration and those who voted for it the credit or the blame for whatever impact this has. And I think it will be basically positive. We know it will keep interest rates down. I mean, you've got Alan Greenspan, who's the Republican head of the Federal Reserve Bank, who has constantly told the Congress they need to do a deficit reduction package in this range, and they need to do it immediately to keep interest rates down and to help the economy to recover. But let me make two points. Just a substantive point--I don't want to talk about politics but just the substance of it. Number one, the country has been in an economic difficulty on and off for 20 years. The high water mark of American economic dominance was about 20 years ago. Since then the pressures of a global economy, which have punished the relatively undereducated, the relatively rural, the people that didn't fit very well in the global economy, have been building up and basically real wages of working people have been stagnant or declining, and the work week has been increasing for 20 years. For 12 years we have followed a path that worked in the short run but caused us great grief in the long time. That is, supply-side economics, which basically says we're going to cut taxes and increase spending, took us from a $1 trillion to a $4 trillion deficit--debt, a huge deficit. In the short run, we came out of the recession of '81-'82 after we cut taxes and increased spending and kind of kept the lid on inflation. But in the long run we have dug ourselves into a hole now where we--for example, we actually--almost anybody--Charlie Stenholm said the other day, ``We need to be spending more money helping places like California and Connecticut and some other places to convert from a defense to a domestic economy. But we don't have the money. We need to do whatever we can to train our non-college educated workers better. We don't have the money. We've got a lot of things we need to do. We can't and we're paralyzed''. So I would say to you that we didn't get into this mess overnight. We're not going to get out of it overnight. The second thing I want to say is, we need to bring the deficit down to zero. To do that, we have to pass health care reform. Then to make people more productive we need to pass our education bill and the welfare reform bill, and we need to pass a lot of other things. There's lots of work we need to do here to open new markets--you asked the NAFTA question--to get this economy turned around. But I expect to be held accountable. I just would tell you, this bill is important. Without it, we can't go forward. But it is not the end-all and the be-all. Cuba and Vietnam”