Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, they're wrong. They're wrong. Go back and look at what they said about the budget program they voted…”

“Well, first of all, they're wrong. They're wrong. Go back and look at what they said about the budget program they voted for in 1990, which had taxes and budget cuts in it and which had an outrageous estimate of economic growth in it, so much so that they changed their own program. They wrote it down by about a third within 60 days after passing it. I mean, the things I call tax increases and spending cuts are the same things that Ronald Reagan and George Bush and the Republicans in the Senate call tax increases, spending cuts. They say that if they, under the budget they passed in 1992, were going to raise Medicare expenses 12 percent a year, and we cut it back to 9 percent a year, shaving $50 billion off the deficit and now almost $60 billion from what it would have been under their last budget, that that doesn't count as a cut. They say that it's not a cut. I think it is. They say if we reduce interest costs to the Federal deficit, which we have done, by the way, already--the deficit this year is going down because we're bringing the deficit down, because the markets have brought long-term interest rates down because they see finally there's somebody serious about bringing the deficit down--they say that doesn't count as reducing the deficit. They're playing word games. All of a sudden they've got a whole new dictionary now that they're out of power. I'm using exactly the same calculations that they used for 12 years on what increases the deficit, what reduces the deficit. Defense Cuts”