Bill Clinton: “I think it--obviously, when you have more money than you thought you were going to, it should make it easier to have an…”

“I think it--obviously, when you have more money than you thought you were going to, it should make it easier to have an omnibus agreement. And I hope it will. From my point of view, I want to caution, however, that--all of this, what we have this year, we will actually have, everything else we're projecting--that what will make the projections turn out to be facts is very disciplined, responsible management of the economy and the clear signal to the markets that we're managing our long-term problems. So this should make it easier to make an agreement on Social Security and Medicare and paying down the debt and still have more funds for education, medical research, tax cuts, you name it. But we have to have our priorities in order. We still don't want to go off and have a big tax cut and ignore the Medicare liabilities, the Social Security liabilities, or what I consider to be the enormous opportunity we have to pay off the debt of the country over the next 15 years. When I became President, we had a $290 billion deficit, and it was projected to increase forever. And now we project that next year we'll have a $142 billion surplus, and we could actually be out of debt in 15 years. Now, I think it's important to note why that is. Again, in a global economy with global financial markets, I think that's quite a desirable thing, because it means lower interest rates for everything from business investment to car payments to home mortgages to college loans to credit cards. It means, therefore, more money for jobs, for growth, for wages; and it means we are relatively less dependent on global markets in times of turmoil, like we had in Asia. It also means that our trading partners--again, we want them to grow; they need to do well, these developing countries--it means they will be able to access capital, that they will have to get from beyond their borders, at lower interest rates than would otherwise be the case, because we won't be--the Government, at least--won't be in these markets. So I think the idea of the United States and, hopefully, other wealthy countries in the world being free of public debt, at least long- term, structural public debt--you know, maybe if a country wants to undertake to rebuild all its airports and float bonds to do it, that's one thing. But you know what I mean; I mean long-term, structural public debt--I think is a very appealing prospect for the world over the next 15 to 20 years, because then we could take a lot of this investment capital that would normally go to governments in the United States and put it into these developing economies, where it is desperately needed, in a way that would benefit them and benefit us. So I hope that--again, this should have appeal to the Republicans as well as the Democrats, the idea of making America debt-free. Mr. Dunham. Right.”