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Now, part of the reason I was endorsed by so many newspapers in the South on this issue was that they understand the difference between a maximal investment strategy and one I think is politically based. I am not arguing that the Democrats should not appeal to the middle class. I think we have to. But the reason I have survived in this campaign is that I think people perceive that we are going to put our money into that engine. My feelings on this are very strong because when the middle-class tax cut idea came up, every adviser said to me, "Look, they are all going to do this. You are going to be left out there in the cold. It's just not good economics." And the reason I feel that way is, unless we get serious about returning to being competitive, there is no future.
CLINTON: This is a campaign speech against a middle-class tax cut, as if it ) were the main issue in this election. It is not the main issue in the election. It was never the main part of my economic program. There are a thousand other things in both of our programs.
I don't blame Senator Tsongas. He would rather beat on the middle-class tax cuts because we know all the upscale people who write editorials think it is frivolous. It is not, and I will say again, We are waging class warfare. I think a great country can afford to be more just. Let's quit making these political speeches and talk about how you are going to change people's lives.
Q. A lot of the election is or should be around another aspect of the economy, deficit reduction. Isn't Senator Tsongas right when he begins to talk about the possibility of cutting entitlement programs?
CLINTON: Well, the question is, How do you do it and under what circumstance? Entitlements are now more than 40% of the annual budget. So anybody would be right to say we can't let entitlements increase at the rate they did in the '80s and hope to get control of the budget.
What are your options for doing that, and when do you bring them in? Why have entitlements increased? Because we have cost of living increases, and everybody gets them. You also have to say entitlements increased because poverty exploded, and the more poor people you have, the more entitlement spending there will be, which is why we need an antipoverty strategy, which is why I have called for investments in welfare reform and the earned-income tax credit to lift the working poor above the poverty line. There is also the untrammeled growth of health-care costs, which are ripping back through the entitlement programs. They are breaking the bank on Medicare and Medicaid.
So how are we going to control health-care costs? I have no problem with asking upper-income Medicare beneficiaries to pay more for their Medicare premiums.