Bill Clinton: “Let me say first, with regard to Social Security, right now the Social Security tax brings in more money than is…”

“Let me say first, with regard to Social Security, right now the Social Security tax brings in more money than is necessary to pay out in Social Security every year. And Social Security should be stable for quite a long while now. I don't think you have to worry about that. Secondly, does the deficit matter? Yes, it does. It matters when we have to take 15 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes to pay in interest on the debt. That's money we can't spend on education or health care or jobs or something else. And it can weaken our economy, because we have to borrow money sometimes from overseas. Now, if we keep going, right now, the real way to look at the deficit is, what is the percentage of our deficit as a percentage of our national income? If you look at it that way and compare it to all the other major economies of the world, our deficit now, we've gotten it low enough so that it's smaller as a percentage of our national income than any of the countries we compete with, major economies, except one, except Japan. And if we keep going, we'll get it down below that. We have to keep driving it down. The only way to get it to zero is to go back to the very first question I was asked. The only way to get it to zero, because we're cutting defense all we can, and that gentleman made--I don't think we can cut it any more. And I'm very concerned. I don't want the Congress to cut defense any more than is in our plan in this budget session. We're cutting defense already. We're cutting domestic spending that's discretionary for the first time since 1969. The only thing that's going up in this budget is that health care costs are still going up at 2 and 3 times the rate of inflation. So the only way we can get the deficit down to zero now is to bring health care costs in line with inflation. And that's what I'm trying hard to do. And I hope we can do that. But as long as the deficit is going down instead of up, which it is now, it will be a smaller and smaller percentage of our income, and our economy will be stronger. And I think you can be confident that we're going in the right direction. And that's the important thing. We're going in the right direction, not the wrong direction. President's Travel Costs [A participant in Charlotte asked what it cost the taxpayers for the President to attend the NCAA basketball championship games.]”