Bill Clinton: “Well, it may have been, but let me tell you why we did it. What we're trying to do is to avoid--frankly, the main reason…”

“Well, it may have been, but let me tell you why we did it. What we're trying to do is to avoid--frankly, the main reason we did it was to avoid overpromising, because I don't believe that this plan alone can restore America's health. I just think it is the critical, it is the critical first step. Without it I think you have total uncertainty; you have chaos; you have interest rates going back up again, and you have a Government that can't get anything done. With it you begin the march to progress. I think to get total economic health you have to do something about the health care crisis, do something about the way the Government does its business, deal with the welfare reform issue. And then there has to be a whole set of other economic strategies to help people convert from a defense to a domestic economy, continue the education and training of the work force, open new markets, all those other things. So I think what they were trying to do was to say yes, it will do something, but we don't want to overpromise. Here's a model we ran through, and this is where we got. It may or may not have been a mistake, but we were trying to give people a sense of what our own research had produced. Media Coverage”