Bill Clinton: “Well, here's what happened, and I think it's very important for the voters to listen to this. The Republicans put out…”

“Well, here's what happened, and I think it's very important for the voters to listen to this. The Republicans put out this contract, and they said, ``If you'll give us control of the Congress, we will take you back to what we did in the 1980's, trickle-down Reaganomics. We'll give massive tax cuts, mostly to upper income people.'' That must be appealing in Connecticut; you have a lot of upper income people. ``We'll give massive tax cuts. We'll increase defense; we'll increase Star Wars. And we'll balance the budget in 5 years.'' That costs a trillion dollars. The only way to do that is to cut everything, including Social Security, across the board 20 percent. That's $2,000 a Social Security recipient. You say, we don't want to do that. Then you have to cut everything else in the Government across the board 30 percent. That bankrupts Medicare. If you don't do that, you're right back to where they were before, massive deficits, shipping jobs overseas. Connecticut lost 150,000 jobs in the last 4 years because of that kind of economic policy. We need to invest and grow with discipline. We don't need a lot of easy promises. We need to embrace the challenges of the global economy, invest, and grow. That's my approach. This Social Security threat is very real. If they carry through on their promises, they cannot keep their promise to cut the taxes and increase the spending and balance the budget without going after it. Ms. Peckinpaugh. President Clinton, thanks for answering our viewer questions.”