Bill Clinton: “Everything--everything. We did cut Star Wars quite a lot, as a matter of fact, a whole lot. I want you to know something…”

“Everything--everything. We did cut Star Wars quite a lot, as a matter of fact, a whole lot. I want you to know something else: I will not support a tax increase, even a tax increase, even a tax increase on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of the American people, who are the only people whose rates are being raised, I won't support that until I know we have the spending cuts, too. I don't think anybody should pay more until we cut more. And I did ask a broad base of the American people to pay a modest energy tax, and I want to talk about that. I did it because the deficit was bigger than I thought and because I knew we had to bring down interest rates, and if we did, it would save money for the American people. And let me just tell you what's happened. Since the election, just since the election, since it was clear we were going to finally tackle this debt, interest rates have dropped seven-tenths of one percent. If every one of you--I want you to think about it--every one of you who has a variable interest rate on a home mortgage, a car payment, a credit card payment, you're going to make more money in the next year than you'll pay in this energy tax if we can keep the interest rates down. So it's good in the short run but it will also be good in the long run for America. But I want to talk a little about the energy tax, because that's what most of you will pay. People have been arguing for years that America ought to have a big increase in the gas tax, because we have the lowest gas tax in the world. Then they argue we ought to have a big increase in the carbon tax because we use a lot of coal, and that's polluting. I concluded that we shouldn't do either one of those because it wouldn't be fair to the American people. A carbon tax would hit those States with high unemployment in the East, like Ohio and West Virginia, where people earn their livings in the coal mines that are around them. We've already got a tough Clean Air Act that's going to require them to pay more, and I didn't think that was fair. And I didn't want a big increase in the gas tax because I didn't think that was fair to people who lived in rural areas or people who had long commuting times and no options for mass transit. It's great if you live in the city and get on the subway every day, but if you have to drive to and from work and you drive long distances, it can be very burdensome. So we decided--and I might say I want to compliment him; the Vice President had a lot to do with this decision--that we ought to go with a Btu tax based on the health--excuse me, the heat component, the energy component of natural gas, of oil, and of coal, to spread it broadly across energy sources so that the whole thing would encourage conservation, would encourage renewable resources, would encourage less reliance on foreign oil, and would help us to bring down the debt. I think it is the fairest way to go, and it's a balanced thing to do. Let me say, having done that, I also believe there are some things we must spend more on, because the only reason for reducing the deficit is not just to prove you can bring it down but because it's better for the people of this country. And if we reduce the deficit, it means we spend more of your money on education and jobs and less paying interest on the debt. And if we reduce the debt, it means that you'll be able to borrow more money privately and at lower interest rates. But we still have to spend some more money, and let me tell you where. The first thing we need to do is to adopt a jumpstart program that I have recommended that will create a half a million jobs in this country to try to take advantage of this economic recovery with new jobs over the next year. The second thing we need to do is to focus closely on the cities and the problems they have with some specific efforts. And let me just mention a few. Our program will invest more money in the cities, in street projects, park projects, water projects, sewer projects, environmental cleaning projects. It will provide for the young people of this country who live in depressed areas, not just big cities but poor rural areas, 680,000 new summer jobs this summer, something that is needed here. I am going to challenge the business community to join with me to create more than a million new summer jobs this summer so we won't have to worry about what the kids are doing. If we give them something to say yes to, we won't have to spend so much time telling them to say no to things. We're also going to do some other things that we know work. There's been a lot of people talking about it. This budget, for the first time, fully funds the Head Start program that gives every child a chance to go to Head Start. It fully funds the nutrition program for women and infant children. It will give us the mechanism to immunize every child in this country against preventable childhood diseases. Now, there will be those who say, ``Well, just don't spend any new money.'' But let me say, we have been closing the barn door after the cow's out, as we say in my home State, for decades on these problems. You spend $1 on Head Start and WIC, you save $3 down the road in problems kids are going to have. If you spend $1 on childhood immunizations, you save $10 down the road in preventable childhood diseases. You tell me how we can defend having the finest pharmaceutical companies in the world in this country, still the richest on Earth, and yet, only Haiti and Bolivia have lower childhood immunization rates in this hemisphere than the United States. It's inexcusable, and we're going to change it. We can do better. Education works. And I intend to follow through on my pledge to make college loans available to all Americans based on their ability to repay when they take a job and giving a huge number of Americans the right to earn their way out of their college loan, either before or after they go to college, with national service as police officers or teachers or in community youth programs. These are the kinds of things that can turn this country around. Let me just mention two other things. The people of our country have elected politicians for years who have always talked tough about crime. It's sort of like being for motherhood and apple pie; you've got to be against crime. And I don't mean to trivialize this; no one is for crime. But there are some things, you know, that work. Drug treatment works. Jobs work. And there are law enforcement strategies that work. And unfortunately, most cities don't have enough money to implement them, because they require you to put police back in the same communities working with their neighbors. One part of our plan will put another 100,000 police offi- cers on the street in this country over the next 3 to 4 years, and that will make a difference. There are some things in this plan that will be especially good for this State, one of which is full funding of the Ryan White Act to care for people with AIDS. Another is that we will spend almost $5 billion over the next 4 years retraining workers and reinvesting in communities who have been hurt by defense closings. It's time to stop talking about conversion and start doing something about it. Last year the Congress--I have to say something to take up for your congressional delegation here--the United States Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for defense conversion, to go into communities that have been hurt, to educate people again who'd lost their jobs, to give communities incentives to find new kinds of peacetime investments to build for a better future. And the administration which preceded me released zero dollars of that $1.7 billion. I just talked to my Budget Director, Leon Panetta, who's up in northern California today, and confirmed that we will shortly release $500 million of that fund, a lot of which will go to the State of California to put people back to work. Today when I leave you, I'm going to northern California, and tomorrow morning there I will announce a new technology policy. And I don't want to go through all of it now, but just let me say this: One of the things that I'm proudest of about this budget is that we reinvest more money than we cut in defense research in domestic research. We are trying to find answers to the profound environmental difficulties we face today. We believe we can create jobs in saving America's environment and the global environment. We believe they can be created in the most sophisticated research and our most advanced labs that used to worry about how to find new ways to destroy massive populations. And we believe we can create them in the national forests of our country and throughout the land with reforestation projects to clean up the air and put people back to work, and in all manner of ways in between. I need your support for this program. The Members of Congress can only be expected to do what they think the people back home will stick by them in doing. We've got to cut spending. We've got to increase some taxes. We've got to invest some in America. We need an economic program that really recognizes that we live in a world where the capacity of our people and their ability to work together, their ability to learn new things, their ability to have access to investment capital, and their ability to live together so that they draw strength from one another is the critical element in our future. We cannot continue to go on with the kind of paralysis and division and just ignoring our problems that has ripped us for too long. Nobody wants to talk about half the things that I tried to deal with in this budget because they're too painful. But if only you worry about what's happening today and tomorrow, you never really look beyond that. And I tell you, this is a historic moment for us. We have an inordinately great opportunity to fashion a whole new future for America if we have the courage to seize it. But let me say to all of you, I want to make two points to every one of you here. And since so many of you here are students here, at least one of these will be preaching to the choir: Point number one, the President and the Congress, working with the people of this country, can create a framework of opportunity, but that is all. Seizing the opportunity depends upon the individual initiative of people in every community in this country. And making it really work depends upon decisions made by people at the grassroots level. You have to make these things work by taking advantage of them. If we pass these programs, for goodness sakes, seize them; make them work. Rededicate yourselves to the proposition that you'll do your part to solve the problems of your community and your country. The second point I plead with you to communicate to the Members of the House and the Senate is that you understand you can't just have the sweet parts of this program; you've got to have the tough parts too. You know, if you, for example, are feeling pretty good and you're in a business that's doing pretty well, it's easy for you to say, ``Well, the only thing I care about is the budget cuts. Just let them cut the budgets.'' Or if you're not doing very well, you might say, ``The only thing I care about is the spending increases and taxing those rich folks, because I don't have that kind of money.'' Or if you're sort of in the middle, you might say, ``I like the budget cuts and the taxes, but I don't want the spending. I'd just as soon have the deficit down, and then I wouldn't have to pay the energy taxes.'' In other words, every one of you, if you look just at your own interests, could find one part of this program that is not in your interest today. So we have to ask ourselves the question I put to the Congress and to you, the American people, on Wednesday night. You can't just say, ``What's in it for me?'' You have to ask, ``What's in it for us?'' Let me close with just this story. I left my wife and my daughter at the White House this morning, and I walked across the lawn to get on the helicopter to come to the plane to come out here, and it was snowing and cold. And I said, boy, am I glad to be in California, when I got off the plane. But at least it was 20 degrees or 30 or whatever it was this morning. But a couple of days ago, I got up in the morning in Chillicothe, Ohio, the first capital of the State of Ohio, and I went running in the city park with the Mayor. It was 3 degrees, 3. But all along the road coming in there, there were hundreds and hundreds of people standing out there in the dark when I'd come in the night before in 3-degree temperature, saying, ``We want our country back. We want our country to work again.'' And then I flew to New York and I had a 50-minute drive to Franklin Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park, New York, where we went to a school that was built during the WPA which is still a functioning school, a beautiful school, proving that work is better than idleness when you can put people to work. And all along the way it was 8 degrees, and all along the way hundreds and hundreds of people along the way with their signs up. They weren't all friendly, but--[laughter]--and by the way, that's good, too. That's another thing we've done: People are debating these issues now and at least participating. But 9 out of 10, 9 out of 10 of them were favorable. And there was this incredible sign standing there in the cold. I mean, 8 degrees; we were in single digits and out there on the highway. Nobody was going to stop--these people--and in the middle, there was this one guy on this sign that says, ``Do something. Just do something.'' [Laughter] Let's do something, and we'll all win. God bless you, and thank you.”