Bill Clinton: “Well, nothing. He doesn't have a vote in Congress. I think what was done yesterday was wonderful. The press kept saying…”

“Well, nothing. He doesn't have a vote in Congress. I think what was done yesterday was wonderful. The press kept saying, ``Well, what would you do? Here's your plan; how can you criticize the President? Yours was off by $400 billion. You're going to raise the gas tax by 50 cents.'' And so I don't have to do anything. I think, you know, it was nice to see him answer some questions for a change. There's nothing for me to do. I've got a plan, and it'll work, and I want to pass it. And it's good for the country. Let me just say this: We had 67 business executives here from big and small companies last week, 4 energy company executives--half of them were Republicans, one of them was President Bush's cochairman-- supporting this plan. And every one of them said we've got to do it because we've got to bring the deficit down, we've got to keep interest rates down, we've got to stabilize the economy, we need some incentives to grow--every one of them. I mean, there is very broad support for this program among people who really understand it. When I went to Tokyo to meet with the leaders of other industrial nations at the G-7 sum- mit, for 10 years the statement coming out of that meeting had criticized the United States for its budget deficit. For the first time in 10 years, they complimented the United States. And they agree with me that we ought to go and try to get the 111 countries that are in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to lower tariffs on a whole range of issues, eliminate them on a lot of other products. And everybody concedes, who's studied this, that this could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to the American manufacturing sector this year. Why? Because we're doing something about our deficit. We have got to move. We don't need to delay this another month or 2 months or 3 months. That's what they did in 1990, by the way. One of your questions was what didn't work in 1990. In 1990 they said, well, we just can't make up our mind, so we'll delay. So instead of adopting it in August, they adopted it at the end of October. That's 90 precious days almost from the first week in August to the end of October, 90 days we could be dealing with health care; we could be passing the Vice President's recommendations on reinventing Government, which would be even more spending cuts; we could be passing a crime bill to help make our streets safer; that we could be dealing with welfare reform; all these things to strengthen the economy. None of this can be done unless we get this out of the way.”