Bill Clinton: “Every issue in Washington, I suppose, is a political issue. The point I'm trying to make is, if we want to save Social…”

“Every issue in Washington, I suppose, is a political issue. The point I'm trying to make is, if we want to save Social Security and Medicare and pay the debt off, then you have to figure out how much money you have left and how much money the Congress is determined to spend over and above the present budget caps, and you can spend what is left on the tax cut. But to pass a tax cut first and then say, well, I'm sorry, we can't really save Social Security and we're not going to lengthen the life of the Trust Fund, or, I'm sorry we're not going to lengthen the life of the Medicare Trust Fund a day--neither one a day under their proposal-- and we may or may not be able to spend money on education and national defense and, if we do, we'll go back into deficit spending again--I don't think we want to get into that. So I'm saying--you asked me, can we achieve this? Of course we can. Remember, in 1996, in an election year, we passed welfare reform with overwhelming majorities of both parties in both Houses. And yesterday we celebrated cutting the rolls in half. And 12,000 companies are helping us to hire people off welfare. So we can do this. We can do this. We were never going to be able to do it, I might add, unless we had big majorities of both parties in both Houses. It is in our interest, if you want to talk about it in that way, to do the people's work here, to do it this year and to do it next year. And I think it's terribly important, so I hope we'll do it. Social Security Reform Plan/Talk Magazine Interview”