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TSONGAS: The difference between us is that you have a certain number of bullets. I put my bullets, all of them, into growing the economy. By adopting the middle-class tax cut and tax credits for children and that type of thing, the number of bullets allocated to the engine is reduced. So it's a matter of us all having the same number of bullets in our holsters. The question is, What do you shoot those bullets at?
CLINTON: Let's look at some of the things that I advocate spending this money on. No. 1: Nobody gets on out of high school without a system for further training on the job in either Japan or Germany or any of the other high-wage countries. That's a gap we have got to fill.
No. 2: As Paul pointed out, when people lose jobs in Japan, they are not allowed to wander around for a year on unemployment and then take a job making half what they used to make. In other words, Japanese and Germans lose jobs too. What they do is they train people to move them up. You have to keep finding new avenues for manufacturing.
No. 3: The Germans have a much better organized market for small and medium- size businesses to engage in exports, including export finance. There are all kinds of things at work here apart from tax incentives.
And finally, in different ways, both countries have genuine investment banks, which either take equity positions or permit long-term heavy debt. We have to figure out a way to take our best ideas and to move them to market in America, which we are lousy at, and I have offered a specific strategy for that: taking the technologies now identified by the Commerce Department, setting up an advanced research agency to work the way the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did, and then developing in that way.
I do not believe that in a global economy where money is totally mobile, cutting the overall cost of capital is nearly as important as helping families to raise their children and investing in education and training and targeting the job-generating growth of the economy. I think that is the central difference between us.
Q. Isn't Senator Tsongas' point that you are really wasting money with a mere $400 tax cut?
CLINTON: First of all, that assumes this is a zero-sum game. I don't agree. I think some things will produce higher growth than others. Second, as I have said, there are people who believe you can have growth now and fairness later. We tried that in the 1980s. We thought we could starve our consuming class and get growth and everything would be great. And it didn't work out very well.
We basically had a veiled class war in the '80s. I don't accept the proposition that we cannot afford to make a down payment on fairness. There is a whole different argument for the children's tax credit. It is very much harder to raise a child for a middle-class family today than it was 40 years ago. Our country used to take the position that the way to build strong families was to enable the working people to have enough money to raise their families. We have totally abandoned that now in the tax changes of the '80s. We have murdered middle- and lower-middle-class working people and made it very much harder for them to raise successful children, which is, in the end, the test of the success of any society.
Q. Senator Tsongas, you have called that pandering. Do you want to do it again?