Remarks at a Reception for Representative Lois Capps in Pacific Palisades, California - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 2, 2000

It's a trillion dollars over a decade, plus, their tax cut. If you do that, forget it. The country is not getting out of debt. Interest rates will be about a percent higher every year for a decade. Under the Democratic plan championed by Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, if you have interest rates one point lower over a decade, do you know what that's worth to you? Compare this to the tax cut promises they make. If you keep interest rates one point lower, $390 billion in lower borne mortgage payments; $30 billion in lower car payments; $15 billion in lower college loan payments. Or, if my math is right, that's about a $435 billion tax cut in lower interest rates by continuing to pay down the national debt.

It's interesting. I never thought I'd live to see the day that the progressive party in our Nation's Capital was the more fiscally prudent one, because that's progressive politics--to give people--everybody benefits from lower interest rates. And I haven't even said how much money you'd save in business loans and how much it would do for the markets and all of that. So you have to understand there are huge consequences.

I've done everything I could do to leave this country in good shape. But when Al Gore stands up and says, "You ain't seen nothin' yet," that is not just a campaign slogan. I'm not on the ballot, and I believe that. I believe that.

And look, why do I believe that? Because we've turned the thing around. It takes a long time to turn a country around. It's like a big ocean liner, and you have to work at it steadily all the time. Why did the Titanic hit the iceberg? Because they couldn't turn around in a split second. They did see it coming.

So we took our time. We got this thing turned around. It's going in the right direction. But all of the great stuff is still out there.

I was just playing with Lois' grandson. You know, there are young people in this audience who will have babies over the next decade that sometime in the next 10 years, they will come home with babies that will have a life expectancy of 90 years, because of the human genome project. We will be able to predict for infants with their gene maps whether they are likely to develop certain kinds of cancers or other kinds of maladies, and we will then shortly know what kinds of things can be done to minimize--you can't eliminate risk or make people live forever--we will be able to dramatically minimize the health hazards that are predictable in our genes from birth. And when that happens, it will have the biggest boost in life expectancy we've ever seen.

That's the good news. But what are the rest of you going to do with all of us old codgers running around here in 30 years? [Laughter] We're going to have to totally rethink what old age is. We're going to have to--you know, we made a big step on it this year when the Congress voted to repeal the earnings limit on Social Security. We have to rethink this.

And we're going to have to totally rethink the nature of our obligations to our children. And we're going to have to get all this information out there and take advantage of it and still protect your privacy rights, because I don't think anybody ought to get your health records if you don't say yes. I think that's important.