Bill Clinton: “Well, we'll see. A lot of the Senators who came on to the bill late yesterday were holding out because the investment…”

“Well, we'll see. A lot of the Senators who came on to the bill late yesterday were holding out because the investment incentives have been cut back so much by the committee. One of the biggest hurdles was trying to convince some of the Senators that we might increase the investment incentives in the conference. So I can tell you that will be a point of continuing tension. But I expect there will be some real effort to try to get the investment and growth options back in there. Keep in mind, reducing the deficit helps you by bringing down interest rates. But still in the end if you want to grow the economy, somebody has to invest money and create jobs and put people to work. If the unemployment rate in this country were 4 percent instead of 7 percent, we'd have far fewer problems than we do. And the stagnation worldwide of economic activity, which has been going on for some time now, is holding this country back and requires this country to make extraordinary efforts if we're going to swim against the tide and try to grow more than other nations to increase incentives to invest and create jobs and to grow this economy. If you take investment out of part of the country as, for example, you see in California with the big cutbacks in defense, there needs to be some offsetting investment. You can't create jobs out of thin air. So I think we want to see in this economic plan two objectives: really tough deficit reduction, keeping the interest rates down, freeing up money for private sector investment, and increasing incentives by the National Government to get more investment in the economy. And I hope we see it. Iraq”