Bill Clinton: “Let me say, first of all, I don't want to hedge this, I want to try to disagree with you, and I want to tell you that I…”

“Let me say, first of all, I don't want to hedge this, I want to try to disagree with you, and I want to tell you that I have-- this is something on which I have changed my mind more since I have become President than before. And I want to try to explain why. But let me first say that even though we give quite a lot of money in foreign aid, it is a tiny percentage of our overall budget, and the United States gives a far smaller amount of its public money in foreign aid than any other Western country. All the major European countries and Japan give a higher percentage of their budgets to foreign aid than we do. We give less than others. Now, in our defense, that's because we spent more on national defense defending the whole world during the cold war. So we spent a bigger percentage of our income on defense than any of those countries. So we did more. But let me explain why, if I might. If we can, through the judicious use of this aid, succeed in making peace between Israel and the PLO, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Jordanians, we will remove the huge possibility not only of another war, which could send a lot of children from New Hampshire off to fight, but also of spreading terrorism and weapons of mass destruction arising out of that troubled part of the world. Give you another example: Turkey is a very important country to the United States. It's a tough issue. Every time--we have a system which says the Turks and the Greeks don't get along, so we give them both money at the same time. And they are very important to us, both of them, but they don't get along with each other. But Turkey is a secular Muslim country, that is, it is not a fundamentalist country. They have allowed us to try to save the Kurds when we went to war in the Persian Gulf; they helped to support us. By a modest amount of money there, if we can continue to relate to those people and support economic growth and opportunity there, they may save another war 4 or 5 years hence. If we can help to build the economies of the democracies in Latin America, we spend a little bit of money to support democracy there, then all those countries may wind up buying products from New Hampshire and New England and creating jobs for us. We're going to have a Summit of the Americas in December in the United States, and all the heads of all these democratic countries in Latin America are coming up. They all want to be our trading partners. They want to buy more from us. They don't ask much from us, a tiny amount of support for doing that. So can you waste money on foreign aid? You bet we can. Do we have higher priorities here at home than a lot of things we may do? Yes, we do. Do we need to spend some money on foreign aid in order to protect our security interest and our economic interests long-term and diminish the threat of terrorism and the spread of weapons of destruction? I believe we do. And I see it now much more clearly, in all candor, than I did when I was a candidate running. Sitting in the office, I have a totally different view of it than I did before I came. Go ahead. We'll take one or two more. The principal called the assembly to order and can call it off, I think. Deficit Reduction”