Remarks at a Get Out the Vote Rally in San Jose, California - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 13, 2000

That's very important. Paying the debt down gives you lower interest rates. What does that mean to all of you? Lower home mortgages, lower car payments, lower college loan payments, lower credit card payments, lower business loan payments, means more businesses, more jobs, a higher stock market. The rich get richer, but so do the rest of you. This is very important.

Then, with the money that's left, we will invest in education, health care, and the environment, and give the American people a tax cut we can ford for child care, for long-term care, for college tuition tax deductions, and for retirement. That's the Democratic plan.

Now, so what's the choice? Look at the Republican plan. They have a tax cut that's 3 times as big. It costs $1.6 trillion. And keep in mind now, the surplus is estimated to be $2 trillion. I'll be surprised if it's that much, but that's the estimate today--$2 trillion. So you can forget about the zeroes and just remember 2. So they've got this big tax cut, 1.6 trillion. Most of you would be better off under the Gore/Lieberman plan. And some of the rest of us--you know, if I get out and get lucky, I would be better off under their plan in the short run. But it's not right, and here's why.

It's so big--$1.6 trillion. Then, they want to partially privatize Social Security. Now, that costs another trillion dollars. Why? Because if all of you who are young take your payroll tax out and put it in the stock market, they've still got to pay all of us that are 55 or over 100 percent of the benefits they promised. You can't spend the money twice, so you have to put another trillion in. Okay, so that's 1.6 plus 1. Then, they want to spend about a half a trillion dollars, .5. But the surplus is only 2. Now, 1.6 plus 1 plus .5 is 3.1; 3.1 is bigger than 2. It's all you have to remember.

So what does that mean? That means that even though they spend less money than Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Mike Honda will, they'll be--on education, on health care, and on the environment--we'll still he hack in deficits. It means higher interest rates. It means you will pay more for home mortgages, more for college loans, more for car payments, more for credit cards, more for business loans. It means higher interest rates, more inflation, and a slower economy. This is not complicated.

But you need to be able to explain to people. I get the feeling people think, well, this one sounds good; that one sounds good. This is a huge choice. We tried it our way for 8 years. Then we tried it the deficit way before for 12 years. Our way works better. Go tell the American people, if you want to keep the prosperity going, you've got to do this.

Now, here's the second point. It's not just about prosperity. We're not just better off; this country is better than it was 8 years ago. What do I mean by that? Listen. The crime rate has gone down every year, to a 26-year low. The welfare rolls have been cut in half, to a 32-year low. Teen pregnancy is down; teen drug abuse is down. The number of people without health insurance is down for the first time in 12 years, thanks to the Children's Health Insurance Program. The environment is up--the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner. We've cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps in 8 years as they did in 12 and set aside more land permanently than any administration since Theodore Roosevelt, 100 years ago.