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George Bush puts out a health-care program that is pandering. If we had instead a national health proposal that was going to control costs, was going to lead us to a comprehensive long-term-care program, and if we had to have some more money to pay for it, in the context of controlling the entitlements, then should upper-income Medicare beneficiaries be asked to pay for it? Absolutely! Should we ask them to pay more premiums when we are not doing anything to the health-insurance companies, when we are not doing anything on the drug companies that are charging more for drugs in America than they are overseas, when we are not doing anything to reduce the health-care bureaucracy? No. It will be putting more money down the same rathole.
TSONGAS: My position is that if you make more than $125,000, you are going to have to help pay for Medicare, and that down the road, if we don't have a handle on the deficit, I would go to people above that income level and say you are going to get less in cost of living increases on Social Security. The negative ads saying that I wanted to cut it across the board is exactly what your position was in 1986.
CLINTON: No. My position was for the one-year freeze. That's what the resolution was. The same thing you were for in '84, what your book says you are still for. It doesn't say just high-income people. You even say it's not even very much to lower the cost of living on an annual basis to everybody, but it's a good beginning, implying that there might even be more coming.
TSONGAS: The book was written over a year ago, and I have taken a very detailed position on that, as you know.
CLINTON: So that's no longer your position that's in the book?
TSONGAS: A lot of changes have taken place.
Now, the deficit. You have to deal with it. It is everybody's non-issue. The attitude in Washington is that a $400 billion deficit is baseline. The question is do you go above or below that. It's not baseline. It is killing us.
There are two components. You have a revenue line that is going up in a de minimis fashion. You have an expenditure line that is going at a higher rate. So in that sense, the message to the market is very clear. These lines are diverging. So anybody who calculates long-term interest rates puts them very high. This government hasn't demonstrated that it has the will and discipline to finally get these lines to start converging. With that signal, long-term interest rates will by definition come down, so you have to affect both lines. You have to affect the revenue line by having an investment-based strategy so your revenue line gets deflected upward, and then you put a freeze on your expenditures.
A budget agreement with fixed categories makes no sense. The cold war is over. So let's take some of the monies available in the Defense Department, move them into things like Head Start, so you cap the budget. You are not going to balance the budget right away. No one is going to.
CLINTON: There are two huge problems here that will keep Congress from ever - being able to deal with the deficit and the President from being able to explain it to the American people. The reason it got up to $400 billion, to be fair to the President and the Congress, is not so much because of spending but because the bottom dropped out of the economy.