Bill Clinton: “I would like to respond to a couple of those things. First of all, Senator Dole says too many of our budget cuts are in…”

“I would like to respond to a couple of those things. First of all, Senator Dole says too many of our budget cuts are in the latter half of our plan. My response to that is he has a higher percentage of his budget cuts in the last 2 years than we do. That is a smokescreen to continue the intransigent Republican position that we should not ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of the burden, even though they got the tax cuts in the eighties and received well over half the economic gains of the eighties. Secondly, my response to Senator Dole's claim that this bill imposes burdens on people who are no longer living--you heard all that--that implies that somehow the Democrats are voting to raise the estate taxes on people who have--estate taxes are not imposed on people who have no estate, that is, who have not yet died. But that is totally misleading. All the Congress did was to extend the estate tax rates imposed back in the late eighties. And I haven't checked this this morning, but I believe Senator Dole voted for that. I believe that this bill extends the estate tax rates that Senator Dole voted for. I believe that. In any case, the Congress voted for it. He knows that this bill does not somehow increase taxes on citizens after they die. That is totally misleading. Let me see what else he said. Oh, he said we didn't cut the deficit enough. My answer to that is we don't cut it all the way to zero, but we will. And we cut the deficit much more than the Dole plan did, and we do it specifically. We have a lot more deficit reduction than he did, and in his plan he had $66 billion in, quote, unspecified cuts. He wouldn't even say where the tough cuts were coming from.”