Bill Clinton: “First of all, we got a good number of votes from Georgia for which I am very grateful. But let me tell you how I'm doing…”

“First of all, we got a good number of votes from Georgia for which I am very grateful. But let me tell you how I'm doing it generally. I'm trying to meet with the House Members in the big caucuses first: the Conservative Caucus; the Mainstream Forum, which is sort of the DLC group; the Black Caucus; the Hispanic Caucus; the Women's Caucus. I've met with all of them, except I'm meeting with the Mainstream Forum tonight, and then talking to individual Members about individual concerns. In the Senate we pretty well know the 10 or 15 Senators that could go either way and what the issues are for them, and so I'm trying to talk to each of them individually about their concerns. I met with four Senators over the weekend, and I have talked to a number of others over the phone. The concerns basically are twofold. They break down into two broad categories. Some are just worried about a political reaction. And many of them have said to me, ``Look, if our constituents knew what was in this, we know they would support it.'' This is the only political issue in my lifetime where people have known less about it as it's gone on; that is, known less about the issue as time has gone on. The night I gave the State of the Union Address when there was a great deal of support for this was really the time when people had the largest number of facts. And then all the groups that ginned up opposition to it--it's like this spokesperson for a small business group last week ran a car washing service; turned out she got a tax reduction, not a tax increase out of this plan, and she didn't know it. And the people that had gotten her to stand up and speak against something she didn't know what was in. So for those folks we have really got work on just making sure that they understand, that we now have an aggressive effort to get the evidence out that this is fair, progressive, real deficit reduction and real job creation. It's going to keep interest rates down and get jobs up. I mean, that's just a--that's reality, and I think that's important. To the second argument is that the country wants us to make a decision and go on about other things. They don't want us to fool around for 60 more days without a budget. They want us to make a decision and then deal with health care, the crime bill, the welfare reform bill, all the other issues out there facing us. Now, there's another group of people who basically didn't like either the bill that passed the Senate or the bill that passed the House but are more than prepared to take the political heat associated with serious deficit reduction if they can get a bill that they agree with. Senator Nunn, for example, told me that there were basically two big issues for him. And he told me that he might have reluctantly voted for the House bill because the House bill addressed one issue, which is that we need some more incentives in the Tax Code for people to invest their money in job-creating activities. And in the House, you know, we had incentives for new and small business capital gains tax. You invest your money in a business capitalized at $15 million a year less; if you hold it for 5 years, you cut your tax rate in half on the gain. By raising personal income tax rates, we created a significant incentive to halve capital gains generally by investing in new businesses. We had some new incentives for new plant and equipment. We had new incentives to revive real estate and homebuilding. We had incentives to do more research and development. When the Senate passed its bill to move from the Btu tax down to the fuel tax at 4.3 percent, one of the ways they did it was just to eliminate all that stuff, as well as the empowerment zones to try to get free enterprise into the depressed urban and rural areas. They cut that way, way back, so--no, they eliminated it in the Senate bill. So, I believe that that concern will be ad- dressed in the conference report. That is, I think the final bill will, through a combination of other spending cuts and maybe some just minor modifications to the revenue package, put a lot of those job incentives back in there. The other issue that Senator Nunn raises is one with which I am very sympathetic but one that I am absolutely convinced we cannot deal with right now but that we have to deal with. And that is that there needs to be some limits, some discipline on the growth of entitlement spending. Let me just give you an example. The budget that was passed last year before I became President had an estimated 12 percent a year increase in health care costs, Medicare and Medicaid, 12 percent a year. Now, the rolls were growing some, but most of it was just inflation, paying more for the same health care. We cut that back to 9 percent a year and saved $55 billion or so off the previous budget, a big shave. But still if you look at this budget now, you've got defense going down, many domestic programs going down, and an overall freeze on domestic spending. That is, for all the increases we have in Head Start and worker training and new technologies and defense conversions, we have offsetting decreases in something else. And the only thing that's really increasing in this budget are the retirement programs, Social Security cost-of-living increases, which are at least covered by the Social Security tax, and other cost-of-living increases on retirement programs and health care. That's what's going up. So Senator Nunn and others believe, and I do, that you have to find a way to control health care costs. Otherwise, you're going to give the whole budget over to health care. You wind up cutting defense too much, and you don't have enough money left to spend where you ought to spend it, which is in revitalizing this economy. The problem is that if you put a cap on health care costs in this budget without reforming health care, which is the next big issue I want Congress to take up, if you did that, then all that would happen is you'd impose a hidden tax on every American with health insurance. Because what happens is if you just quit paying doctors and hospitals at the Federal level, then they just send a bill to your employers and to you if you pay part of your health insurance. And that's why I don't think we can pass this cap now. I think we can pass the controls on health care costs by the Government if we reform health care. So anyway, that's a long answer. But you're interested in the Georgia politicians. I'm dealing with the political concerns and the substantive concerns as they come up. Senator Sam Nunn”