Remarks at a fundraising dinner in Houston, Texas

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 23, 1995

Now, my budget is a good, credible, conservative budget. It gets rid of hundreds of programs. But it does not - it does not, in this age, gut education or research or technology. I want everybody to get on that information superhighway and ride straight into the 21st century, and it is nuts for us to cut education if we're going to do that. It is wrong. And it doesn't hurt families. I can't imagine my getting a deduction for Chelsea's college costs, which is what would happen under their bill, and turn around and raising taxes on families making $20,000 a year trying to support three children. But that's exactly what they do. That's wrong. That is wrong. It doesn't make sense, and it's wrong.

And on the health care issue, you may think there's a lot of demagoguery in it, but let me tell you - we have got to slow the rate of medical inflation, but that is happening. Health insurance premiums went up less than inflation this year for the first time in 10 years. We can fix this. But we do not want to cut Medicare so much.

Listen to this. This is their proposal: Cut Medicare so much that we stop paying the copay requirements for really poor elderly people. You've got a lot - a bunch of old folks out there living on $300 a month. And the way this budget, their budget, is written now, they get hit the hardest. We stopped - because right now, we pay their copays and their deductibles because they don't have enough money to live on. And it's estimated a million elderly people could drop out of the Medicare system if the budget passed. We don't have to do that. We don't have to do that.

And we don't have to go back to the time where we say to an elderly couple, if they're lucky enough to both live and be happy, and they're way up in their seventies or eighties, and they're still together, but they don't have much money, and one of them needs to go into a nursing home, we don't have to go back to the time when you could tell the person that's not going into the nursing home, "You've got to sell your house. You've got to sell your car. You've got to clean out your bank account, or your spouse can't get any help." Do you really want to give those people that choice? I don't. We don't have to. It's in their budget, but we don't need it to balance the budget. And I'm going to fight it. It's not right. It's not right.

Do you really want to take thousands of kids out of the chance to be in the Head Start program or cut the number of college scholarships for poor kids at the time when we need more children going to college? What do you think it's going to do to the racial dialog in this country when you need more and more and more education? Look around here. If we'd had this dinner 20 years ago and charged us to get in, would there have been any black people here? Would there have been any Hispanic people here? No. How do you think they got here? They have good educations. What are we going to do - does that make any sense? No.

I could go on and on and on. This is - they want to get rid of the Commerce Department. Who do you think is opening all these doors for all these Texas energy companies in these countries that many people just learned existed a couple of years ago? [Laughter] The Commerce Department, the Energy Department, the United States of America, working in partnership with our business interests to create jobs here in America by building bridges of commerce around the world. Why should we do that? We don't have to, and it doesn't make any sense.