Bill Clinton: “Let me explain how this budget works. The Senate and the House pass a budget resolution, and basically, what they do is…”

“Let me explain how this budget works. The Senate and the House pass a budget resolution, and basically, what they do is to make certain commitments on deficit reduction in general terms and in categories. The actual budgeting, then, passes over--as soon as the Senate and the House resolve their disagreements because their budgets are different, principally, in the volume of the tax cuts and who gets them and when they would come and all that--when they resolve that, then the appropriations committees go to work, so that while these budget resolutions may not have suggested any cuts in any particular programs or may have suggested drastic cuts in other programs, the appropriations committees may differ entirely, and the only thing they'll have to do is to meet a certain level of cut for all the things that are within each subcommittee of the appropriations committee. So it's not clear which programs will be cut and which programs will be exempted from this resolution. Those are just suggestions from the committee, but these budget committees set the outline. Then the appropriations committee have to really make the budget decisions. But essentially, I agree with you. The programs are good. I think they're of modest cost, and they benefit huge numbers of people, and they're the kind of--if you will, the kind of preventive character- building programs that I've tried to support in the crime bill, and I'm having a harder time getting protected there. Conservation Reserve Program [Bud Daniels expressed support for the conservation reserve program as an environmentally beneficial alternative to unnecessary increases in production of grain or livestock.]”