Bill Clinton: “By year's end, if the plan passes, upper income taxes will go up, taxes on the upper 6 percent of the American people…”

“By year's end, if the plan passes, upper income taxes will go up, taxes on the upper 6 percent of the American people; two- thirds of the tax burden would be paid for by people with incomes above $200,000. The tax on the middle class, in the form of an energy tax, would be phased in over a 3-year period and would amount to no more than $17 a month for a family of four with an income of $50,000 to $60,000, by the third year of the plan. By contrast, families with incomes of under $30,000 would be held harmless, and there would be an incentive in this tax program, for the first time, for people who work 40 hours a week but have children in the home and are still in poverty. The tax system would actually lift them out of poverty. So it's a very fair tax plan. But the most important thing from my point of view is that there can't be taxes without an equal amount of spending cuts. And there are substantial spending cuts in this program in everything from Medicare to veterans benefits, to agriculture, to all the specific programs, just about, in the Federal Government. People who say there aren't spending cuts just haven't said it right. And for Mr. Hyde, whom I like a lot, to just get on there and chant their old ``tax-and-spend'' line, I mean, you know, that's the same crowd that presided over the last 12 years where we went from a $1 trillion to a $4 trillion debt, increased the national deficit every year, and reduced our investment in the future. I mean, they actually set in motion the policies which you see manifest all around you today in southern California. And I don't see how they have any credibility on this. Last week in the Senate Finance Committee, there were all kinds of amendments by the Senate Republicans. They were all designed to increase the deficit by moderating tax increases with no offsetting cuts. So there just isn't another plan out there. We're either going to have to make up our mind whether to do the tough stuff necessary in terms of budget cuts and fair revenue increases to bring this deficit down and get control of our economic future and keep these interest rates down, or we're not. And let me just make one other point. For anybody who has refinanced a home loan or refinanced a business loan or gotten a car loan, a consumer loan, a college loan at lower interest rates, a lot of people are going to in the middle class and even some upper income people are going to save more money on lower interest rates than they're going to pay in higher taxes. That's the key thing. We've got to get the interest rates down. We've got to start investment in this economy again. And if we don't, we're going to be in real trouble. You had someone call from Orange County; I see what's happened to real estate in Orange County. Our proposal contains significant incentives to get the real estate business in California up and going again and throughout the country. There are all kinds of things in this plan which are very, very good for business, that the business community has been asking for for years. But we do ask people who are earning income, who have it and whose taxes went down in the eighties while the deficit went through the roof, to pay a fairer share of the tax burden so we can bring the deficit down. NAFTA Mr. Jackson. Relating to the calls we received earlier, Mr. President, a blunt question: Does Ross Perot concern you? And I pose it that way because of his stand on NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. He really is claiming that this country and particularly this State of California is going to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs that would go to Mexico if the agreement should be ratified.”