Clinton_term_one.txt

The most important distinction in this campaign is that I represent real hope for change: a departure from trickle-down economics, a departure from tax-and-spend economics, to invest and grow. But before I can do that I must challenge the American people to change, and they must decide.
Tonight I say to the President: Mr. Bush, for 12 years you've had it your way. You've had your chance, and it didn't work. It's time to change. I want to bring that change to the American people, but we must all decide first we have the courage to change for hope and a better tomorrow.

I believe experience counts, but it's not everything. Values, judgment, and the record that I have amassed in my State also should count for something. I've worked hard to create good jobs and to educate people. My State now ranks first in the country in job growth this year, fourth in income growth, fourth in the reduction of poverty, third in overall economic performance, according to a major news magazine. That's because we believe in investing in education and in jobs.
We have to change in this country. You know, my wife, Hillary, gave me a book about a year ago in which the author defined insanity as just doing the same old thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We have got to have the courage to change. Experience is important, yes. I've gotten a lot of good experience in dealing with ordinary people over the last year and a month. I've touched more people's lives and seen more heartbreak and hope, more pain and more promise than anybody else who's run for President this year. And I think the American people deserve better than they're getting. We have gone from first to 13th in the world in wages in the last 12 years since Mr. Bush and Mr. Reagan have been in. Personal income has dropped while people have worked harder in the last 4 years. There have been twice as many bankruptcies as new jobs created.
We need a new approach. The same old experience is not relevant. We're living in a new world after the cold war. And what works in this new world is not trickle-down, not Government for the benefit of the privileged few, not tax-and-spend but a commitment to invest in American jobs and American education. Controlling American health care costs and bringing the American people together, that is what works. And you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience. Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people. And it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.

Ross gave a good answer, but I've got to respond directly to Mr. Bush. You have questioned my patriotism. You even brought some rightwing Congressmen into the White House to plot how to attack me for going to Russia in 1969 - 1970, when over 50,000 other Americans did.
Now, I honor your service in World War II. I honor Mr. Perot's service in uniform and the service of every man and woman who ever served, including Admiral Crowe, who was your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and who's supporting me. But when Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people's patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong. And a Senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism. I was opposed to the war, but I love my country. And we need a President who will bring this country together, not divide it. We've had enough division. I want to lead a unified country.

The tax increase I have proposed triggers in at family incomes of $200,000 and above. Those are the people who, in the 1980's, had their incomes go up while their taxes went down. Middle-class people, defined as people with incomes of $52,000 and down, had their incomes go down while their taxes went up in the Reagan-Bush years because of six increases in the payroll taxes. So that is where my income limit would trigger.
My plan, notwithstanding my opponent's ad, my plan triggers in at gross incomes, family incomes of $200,000 and above. And then we want to give modest middle-class tax relief to restore some fairness, especially to middle-class people with families with incomes of under $60,000.
In addition to that, the money that I raise from upper income people and from asking foreign corporations just to pay the same income on their income earned in America that American corporations do will be used to give incentives back to upper income people. I want to give people permanent incentives on investment tax credit like President Kennedy and the Congress inaugurated in the early sixties to get industry moving again; a research and development tax credit; a low-income housing tax credit; a long-term capital gains proposal for new business and business expansions.
We've got to have no more trickle-down. We don't need across-the-board tax cuts for the wealthy for nothing; we need to say, here's your tax incentive if you create American jobs the old-fashioned way.
I'd like to create more millionaires than were created under Mr. Bush and Mr. Reagan, but I don't want to have 4 years where we have no growth in the private sector. And that's what's happened in the last 4 years. We're down 35,000 jobs in the private sector. We need to invest and grow, and that's what I want to do.

I agree with the general statement Mr. Bush made. I disagree that we need 150,000 troops to fulfill our role in Europe. We certainly must maintain an engagement there. There are certainly dangers there. There are certainly other trouble spots in the world which are closer to Europe than to the United States. But two former Defense Secretaries recently issued reports saying that 100,000 or slightly fewer troops would be enough, including President Reagan's former Defense Secretary, Mr. Carlucci. Many of the military experts whom I consulted on this agreed.
We're going to have to spend more money in the future on military technology and on greater mobility, greater airlift, greater sealift, the B - 22 airplane. We're going to have to do some things that are quite costly, and I simply don't believe we can afford, nor do we need to keep 150,000 troops in Europe, given how much the Red Army, now under the control of Russia, has been cut; the arms control agreement concluded between Mr. Bush and Mr. Yeltsin, something I have applauded. I don't think we need 150,000 troops.
Let me make one other point. Mr. Bush talked about taxes. He didn't tell you that he vetoed a middle-class tax cut because it would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy and vetoed an investment tax credit paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.

I think Mr. Perot has confronted this deficit issue, but I think it's important to point out that we really have two deficits in America, not one. We have a budget deficit in the Federal Government, but we also have an investment, a jobs, an income deficit.
People are working harder for less money than they were making 10 years ago: two-thirds of our people, a $1,600 drop in average income in just the last 2 years. The problem I have with the Perot prescription is that almost all economists who have looked at it say that if you cut the deficit this much this quick, it will increase unemployment, it will slow down the economy. That's why I think we shouldn't do it that quickly. We have a disciplined reduction in the deficit of 50 percent over the next 4 years. But first, get incentives to invest in this economy, put the American people back to work. We've got to invest in growth. Nine Nobel Prize-winning economists and 500 others, including numerous Republican and Democratic business executives, have endorsed this approach because it offers the best hope to put America back to work and get our incomes rising instead of falling.

We must have a transition plan, a plan to convert from a defense to a domestic economy. No other nation would have cut defense as much as we already have without that. There are 200,000 people unemployed in California alone because we have cut defense without planning to retrain them and to reinvest in the technologies of the future here at home. That is what I want to do.
This administration may say they have a plan, but the truth is they have not even released all the money, the paltry sum of money that Congress appropriated. I want to take every dollar by which we reduced defense and reinvest it in technologies for the 21st century: in new transportation, in communication, and environmental cleanup technologies. Let's put the American people to work. And let's build the kind of high-tech, high-wage, high-growth economy that the American people deserve.

This country desperately needs a jobs program. And my first priority would be to pass a jobs program, to introduce it on the first day I was inaugurated. I would meet with the leaders of the Congress, with all the newly elected Members of the Congress, and as many others with whom I could meet between the time of the election and the inauguration. And we would present a jobs program.
Then we would present a plan to control health care costs and phase in health care coverage for all Americans. Until we control health care costs, we're not going to control the deficit. It is the number one culprit. But first we must have an aggressive jobs program.
I live in a State where manufacturing job growth has far outpaced the Nation in the last few years; where we have created more private sector jobs since Mr. Bush has been President than have been created in the entire rest of the country, where Mr. Bush's Labor Secretary said the job growth has been enormous. We've done it in Arkansas. Give me a chance to create these kinds of jobs in America. We can do it. I know we can.

Well, let me say that I think that we might ought to review the terms and the way it works. But frankly, I don't think that's the problem today. We have low interest rates today. At least we have low interest rates that the Fed can control. Our long-term interest rates are still pretty high because of our deficit and because of our economic performance.
And there was a terrible reaction internationally to Mr. Bush saying he was going to give us 4 more years of trickle-down economics and other across-the-board tax cuts and most of it going to the wealthy with no real guarantee of investment. But I think the important thing is to use the powers the President does have on the assumption that given the condition of this economy, we're going to keep interest rates down if we have the discipline to increase investment and reduce the debt at the same time. That is my commitment.
I think the American people are hungry for action. I think Congress is hungry for someone who will work with them, instead of manipulate them; someone who will not veto a bill that has an investment credit, middle class tax relief, research and development tax credits, as Mr. Bush has done. Give me a chance to do that.
I don't have to worry, I don't think, in the near term, about the Federal Reserve. Their policies so far, it seems to me, are pretty sound.

In order to keep America the strongest nation in the world, we need some continuity and some change. There are three fundamental challenges. First of all, the world is still a dangerous and uncertain place. We need a new military and a new national security policy equal to the challenges of the post-cold-war era; a smaller permanent military force, but one that is more mobile, well-trained, with high-technology equipment. We need to continue the negotiations to reduce nuclear arsenals in the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. We need to stop this proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Second, we have to face that in this world economic security is a whole lot of national security. Our dollar is at an all-time low against some foreign currencies. We're weak in the world. We must rebuild America's strength at home.
Finally, we ought to be promoting the democratic impulses around the world. Democracies are our partners. They don't go to war with each other. They're reliable friends in the future. National security, economic strength, democracy.

I think our relation-ships with China are important, and I don't think we want to isolate China. But I think it is a mistake for us to do what this administration did when all those kids went out there carrying the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and Mr. Bush sent two people in secret to toast the Chinese leaders and basically tell them not to worry about it. They rewarded him by opening negotiations with Iran to transfer nuclear technology. That was their response to that sort of action.
Now that voices in the Congress and throughout the country have insisted that we do something about China, look what has happened. China has finally agreed to stop sending us products made with prison labor not because we coddled them but because the administration was pushed into doing something about it. Recently the Chinese have announced that they're going to lower some barriers to our products, which they ought to do since they have a $15 billion trade surplus with the United States under Mr. Bush, the second biggest surplus of all, second to Japan.
So I would be firm. I would say, if you want to continue most-favored-nation status for your government-owned industries as well as your private ones, observe human rights in the future. Open your society. Recognize the legitimacy of those kids that were carrying the Statue of Liberty. If we can stand up for our economic interests, we ought to be able to pursue the democratic interests of the people in China. And over the long run they'll be more reliable partners.

I agree that we cannot commit ground forces to become involved in the quagmire of Bosnia or in the tribal wars of Somalia. But I think that it's important to recognize that there are things that can be done short of that and that we do have interests there. There are, after all, two million refugees now because of the problems in what was Yugoslavia, the largest number since World War II, and there may be hundreds of thousands of people who will starve or freeze to death in this winter.
The United States should try to work with its allies and stop it. I urged the President to support this air cover, and he did, and I applaud that. I applaud the no-fly zone, and I know that he's going back to the United Nations to try to get authority to enforce it. I think we should stiffen the embargo on the Belgrade government. I think we have to consider whether or not we should lift the arms embargo now on the Bosnians, since they are in no way in a fair fight with a heavily armed opponent bent on ethnic cleansing. We can't get involved in the quagmire, but we must do what we can.
Mr. Lehrer. All right. Moving on now to divisions in our country. The first question goes to Governor Clinton for two minutes, and Ann will ask it.

A family involves at least one parent, whether natural or adoptive or foster, and children. A good family is a place where love and discipline and good values are transmuted from the elders to the children, a place where people turn for refuge and where they know they're the most important people in the world.
America has a lot of families that are in trouble today. There's been a lot of talk about family values in this campaign. I know a lot about that. I was born to a widowed mother who gave me family values, and grandparents. I've seen the family values of my people in Arkansas. I've seen the family values of all these people in America who are out there killing themselves, working harder for less in a country that's had the worst economic years in 50 years and the first decline in industrial production ever.
I think the President owes it to family values to show that he values America's families. Whether they're people on welfare, you're trying to move from welfare to work; the working poor, whom I think deserve a tax break to lift them above poverty if they've got a child in the house and working 40 hours a week; working families, who deserve a fair tax system and the opportunity for constant retraining. They deserve a strong economy. I think they deserve a family and medical leave act. Seventy-two other nations have been able to do it. Mr. Bush vetoed it twice because he says we can't do something 72 other countries do, even though there was a small business exemption.
So with all the talk about family values, I know about family values. I wouldn't be here without them. The best expression of my family values is that tonight's my 17th wedding anniversary, and I'd like to close my question by just wishing my wife a happy anniversary and thanking my daughter for being here.

Like Mr. Perot, I have held crack babies in my arms. But I know more about this, I think, than anybody else up here because I have a brother who's a recovering drug addict. I'm very proud of him. But I can tell you this: If drugs were legal, I don't think he'd be alive today. I am adamantly opposed to legalizing drugs. He is alive today because of the criminal justice system.
That's a mistake. What should we do? First, we ought to prevent more of this on the street. Thirty years ago there were three policemen for every crime. Now there are three crimes for every policeman. We need 100,000 more police on the street. I have a plan for that. Secondly, we ought to have treatment on demand. Thirdly, we ought to have boot camps for first-time nonviolent offenders so they can get discipline and treatment and education and get reconnected to the community, before they are severed and sent to prison where they can learn how to be first-class criminals.
There is a crime bill that, lamentably, was blocked from passage once again, mostly by Republicans in the United States Senate, which would have addressed some of these problems. That crime bill is going to be one of my highest priorities next January if I become President.

I grew up in the segregated south, thankfully raised by a grandfather with almost no formal education but with a heart of gold who taught me early that all people were equal in the eyes of God. I saw the winds of hatred divide people and keep the people of my State poorer than they would have been, spiritually and economically. I've done everything I could in my public life to overcome racial divisions. We don't have a person to waste in this country.
We are being murdered economically because we have too many dropouts. We have too many low-birth weight babies. We have too many drug addicts as kids. We have too much violence. We are too divided by race, by income, by region. I have devoted a major portion of this campaign to going across this country and looking for opportunities to go to white groups and African-American groups and Latino groups, Asian-American groups and say the same thing: If the American people cannot be brought together, we can't turn this country around. If we can come together, nothing, nothing can stop us.

Over 150,000 Americans have died of AIDS. Well over a million and a quarter Americans are HIV-positive. We need to put one person in charge of the battle against AIDS to cut across all the agencies that deal with it. We need to accelerate the drug approval process. We need to fully fund the act named for that wonderful boy, Ryan White, to make sure we're doing everything we can on research and treatment. The President should lead a national effort to change behavior to keep our children alive in the schools, responsible behavior to keep people alive. This is a matter of life and death.
I've worked in my State to reduce teen pregnancy and illness among children. And I know it's tough. The reason Magic Johnson resigned from the AIDS Commission is because the statement you heard tonight from Mr. Bush is the longest and best statement he's made about it in public. I'm proud of what we did at the Democratic Convention, putting two HIV-positive people on the platform, and I'm proud of the leadership that I'm going to bring to this country in dealing with the AIDS crisis.

Ross, that's a great speech, but it's not quite that simple. I mean, look at the facts. Both parties in Washington, the President and the Congress, have cut Medicare. The average senior citizen is spending a higher percentage of income on health care today than they were in 1965 before Medicare came in. The President's got another proposal to require them to pay $400 a year more for the next 5 years.
But if you don't have the guts to control cost by changing the insurance system and taking on the bureaucracies and the regulation of health care in the private and public sector, you can't fix this problem. Costs will continue to spiral. Just remember this, folks: A lot of folks on Medicare are out there every day making the choice between food and medicine. Not poor enough for Medicare, Medicaid; not wealthy enough to buy their medicine. I've met them, people like Mary Annie and Edward Davis of Nashua, New Hampshire, all over this country. They cannot even buy medicine. So let's be careful. When we talk about cutting health care costs, let's start with the insurance companies and the people that are making a killing instead of making our people healthy.

Mr. Bush made that charge.

I thought the Oregon plan should at least have been allowed to be tried because at least the people in Oregon were trying to do something.
Let me go back to the main point, Sandy. Mr. Bush is trying to run against Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter and everybody in the world but me in this race. I have proposed a managed competition plan for health care. I will say again: You cannot control health care costs simply by cutting Medicare. Look what's happened. The Federal Government has cut Medicare and Medicaid in the last few years. States have cut Medicaid; we've done it in Arkansas under budget pressures. But what happens? More and more people get on the rolls as poverty increases. If you don't control the health care costs of the entire system, you cannot get control of it.
Look at our program. We've set up a national ceiling on health care costs tied to inflation and population growth set by health care providers, not by the Government. We provide for managed competition, not Government models, in every State, and we control private and public health care costs.
Now, just a few days ago, a bipartisan commission of Republicans and Democrats, more Republicans than Democrats, said my plan will save the average family $1,200 a year more than the Bush plan will by the year 2000; $2.2 trillion in the next 12 years; $400 billion a year by the end of this decade. I've got a plan to control health care costs. But you can't just do it by cutting Medicare. You have to take on the insurance companies, the bureaucracies, and you have to have cost controls, yes. But keep in mind, we are spending 30 percent more on health care than any country in the world, any other country. Yet, we have 35 million people uninsured. We have no preventive and primary care. The Oregon plan is a good start if the Federal Government is going to continue to abandon its responsibilities.
I say if Germany can cover everybody and keep costs under inflation, if Hawaii can cover 98 percent of their people at lower health care costs than the rest of us, if Rochester, New York, can do it with two-thirds of the cost of the rest of us, America can do it, too. I'm tried of being told we can't. I say we can. We can do better, and we must.

I'd like to thank the people of St. Louis and Washington University, the Presidential Debate Commission, and all those who made this night possible. And I'd like to thank those of you who are watching. Most of all, I'd like to thank all of you who have touched me in some way over this last year, all the thousands of you whom I've seen. I'd like to thank the computer executives and the electronics executives in Silicon Valley, two-thirds of whom are Republicans, who said they wanted to sign on to a change to create a new America. I'd like to thank the hundreds of executives who came to Chicago, a third of them Republicans, who said they wanted a change. I'd like to thank the people who started with Mr. Perot who have come on to help our campaign. I'd like to thank all the folks around America that no one ever knows about: the woman who was holding the AIDS baby she adopted in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who asked me to do something more for adoption; the woman who stopped along the road in Wisconsin and wept because her husband had lost his job after 27 years; all the people who are having a tough time; and the people who are winning, but who know how desperately we need to change.
This debate tonight has made crystal clear a challenge that is as old as America: the choice between hope and fear, change or more of the same; the courage to move into a new tomorrow or to listen to the crowd who says, "Things could be worse."
Mr. Bush has said some very compelling things tonight that don't quite square with the record. He was President for 3 years before he proposed a health care plan that still hasn't been sent to Congress in total; 3 years before an economic plan; and he still didn't say tonight that that tax bill he vetoed raised taxes only on the rich and gave the rest of you a break, but he vetoed it anyway.
I offer a new direction: Invest in American jobs, American education, control health care costs, bring this country together again. I want the future of this country to be as bright and brilliant as its past, and it can be if we have the courage to change.

I'd like to answer the question, because I've actually been a Governor for 12 years, so I've known a lot of people who have lost their jobs because of jobs moving overseas, and I know a lot of people whose plants have been strengthened by increasing exports.
The trick is to expand our export base and to expand trade on terms that are fair to us. It is true that our exports to Mexico, for example, have gone up, and our trade deficit's gone down. It's also true that just today a record-high trade deficit was announced with Japan.
So what is the answer? Let me just mention three things very quickly. Number one, make sure that other countries are as open to our markets as our markets are to them. If they're not, have measures on the books that don't take forever and a day to implement.
Number two, change the Tax Code. There are more deductions in the Tax Code for shutting plants down and moving overseas than there are for modernizing plants and equipment here. Our competitors don't do that. Emphasize and subsidize modernizing plants and equipment here, not moving plants overseas.
Number three, stop the Federal Government's program that now gives low interest loans and job training funds to companies that will actually shut down and move to other countries, but we won't do the same thing for plants that stay here. So more trade, but on fair terms, and favor investment in America.

No, and here's why; I'll tell you exactly why, because the deficit now has been building up for 12 years. I'll tell you exactly what I think can be done. I think we can bring it down by 50 percent in 4 years and grow the economy.
Now, I could get rid of it in 4 years in theory on the books now, but to do it you'd have to raise taxes too much and cut benefits too much to people who need them, and it would even make the economy worse.

Let me say first of all to you that I believe so strongly in the question you asked that I suggested this format tonight. I started doing these formats a year ago in New Hampshire, and I found that we had huge crowds because all I did was let people ask questions, and I tried to give very specific answers. I also had a program starting last year.
I've been disturbed by the tone and the tenor of this campaign. Thank goodness the networks have a fact check so I don't have to just go blue in the face anymore. Mr. Bush said once again tonight I was going to have a $150 billion tax increase. When Mr. Quayle said that, all the networks said: that's not true; he's got over $100 billion in tax cuts and incentives.
So I'm not going to take up your time tonight, but let me just say this. We'll have a debate in 4 days, and we can talk about this character thing again, but the Washington Post ran a long editorial today saying they couldn't believe Mr. Bush was making character an issue, and they said he was the greatest political chameleon, for changing his positions, of all time.

You don't have to believe that. Here's my point. I'm not interested in his character. I want to change the character of the Presidency. And I'm interested in what we can trust him to do and what you can trust me to do and what you can trust Mr. Perot to do for the next 4 years. So I think you're right, and I hope the rest of the night belongs to you.

I agree with him.

Wait a minute. I want to say just one thing now, Ross, in fairness. The ideas I express are mine. I've worked on these things for 12 years, and I'm the only person up here who hasn't been part of Washington in any way for the last 20 years. So I don't want the implication to be that somehow everything we say is just cooked up and put in our head by somebody else. I worked 12 years very hard as a Governor on the real problems of real people. I'm just as sick as you are by having to wake up and figure out how to defend myself every day. I never thought I'd ever be involved in anything like this.

That bill pays for these urban enterprise zones by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more, and that's why he wants to veto it, just like he vetoed an earlier bill this year. This is not mud slinging. This is fact slinging.

A bill earlier this year -- this is fact -- that would have given investment tax credits and other incentives to reinvest in our cities and our country. But it asked the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more. Mr. Perot wants to do the same thing. I agree with him. I mean, we agree with that.
Let me tell you specifically what my plan does: My plan would dedicate $20 billion a year in each of the next 4 years for investments in new transportation, communications, environmental cleanup, and new technologies for the 21st century. We would target it especially in areas that have been either depressed or which have lost a lot of defense-related jobs.
There are 200,000 people in California, for example, who have lost their defense-related jobs. They ought to be engaged in making high-speed rail. They ought to be engaged in breaking ground in other technologies, doing waste recycling, clean water technology, and things of that kind. We can create millions of jobs in these new technologies, more than we're going to lose in defense if we target it. But we're investing a much smaller percentage of our income in the things you just asked about than all of our major competitors. Our wealth growth is going down as a result of it. It's making the country poorer, which is why I answered the gentleman the way I did before.
We have to both bring down the deficit and get our economy going through these kinds of investments in order to get the kind of wealth and jobs and incomes we need in America.

I support the right to keep and bear arms. I live in a State where over half the adults have hunting or fishing licenses or both. But I believe we have to have some way of checking handguns before they're sold, to check the criminal history, the mental health history, and the age of people who are buying them. Therefore, I support the Brady bill, which would impose a national waiting period, unless and until a State did what only Virginia has done now, which is to automate its records. Once you automate your records, then you don't have to have a waiting period, but at least you can check.
I also think we should have, frankly, restrictions on assault weapons, whose only purpose is to kill. We need to give the police a fighting chance in our urban areas where the gangs are building up.
The third thing I would say doesn't bear directly on gun control, but it's very important. We need more police on the street. There is a crime bill which would put more police on the street, which was killed for this session by a filibuster in the Senate, mostly by Republican Senators. I think it's a shame it didn't pass. I think it should be made the law, but it had the Brady bill in it, the waiting period.
I also believe that we should offer college scholarships to people who will agree to work them off as police officers. I think as we reduce our military forces, we should let people earn military retirement by coming out and working as police officers.
Thirty years ago there were three police officers on the street for every crime. Today, there are three crimes for every police officer. In the communities which have had real success putting police officers near schools where kids carry weapons, to get the weapons out of the schools, or on the same blocks, you've seen crime go down. In Houston there's been a 15-percent drop in the crime rate in the last year because of the work the Mayor did there in increasing the police force. So I know it can work. I've seen it happen.

I know they're popular, but I'm against them. I'll tell you why. I believe, number one, it would pose a real problem for a lot of smaller States in the Congress who would have enough trouble now making sure their interests are heard. Number two, I think it would increase the influence of unelected staff members in the Congress who have too much influence already. I want to cut the size of the congressional staffs, but I think you're going to have too much influence there with people who were never elected who have lots of expertise.
Number three, if the people really have a mind to change, they can. You're going to have 120 to 150 new Members of Congress. Now, let me tell you what I favor instead. I favor strict controls on how much you can spend running for Congress, strict limits on political action committees, requirements that people running for Congress appear in open public debates like we're doing now. If you did that, you could take away the incumbent's advantage, because challengers like me would have a chance to run against incumbents like him for the House races and Senate races, and then the voters could make up their own mind without being subject to an unfair fight. So that's how I feel about it, and I think if we had the right kind of campaign reform, we'd get the changes you want.

I've had more people talk to me about their health care problems, I guess, than anything else. All across America, people who have lost their jobs, lost their businesses, had to give up their jobs because of sick children -- so let me try to answer you in this way.
Let's start with the premise. We spend 30 percent more of our income than any nation on Earth on health care. And yet, we insure fewer people. We have 35 million people without any insurance at all, and I see them all the time. One hundred thousand Americans a month have lost their health insurance just in the last 4 years.
So if you analyze where we're out of line with other countries you come up with the following conclusions: Number one, we spend at least $60 billion a year on insurance, administrative costs, bureaucracy, and Government regulation that wouldn't be spent in any other nation. So we have to have, in my judgment, a drastic simplification of the basic health insurance policies of this country, be very comprehensive for everybody. Employers would cover their employees. Government would cover the unemployed.
Number two, I think you have to take on specifically the insurance companies and require them to make some significant change in the way they rate people in the big community pools. I think you have to tell the pharmaceutical companies they can't keep raising drug prices at 3 times the rate of inflation. I think you have to take on medical fraud. I think you have to help doctors stop practicing defensive medicine. I've recommended that our doctors be given a set of national practice guidelines and that if they follow those guidelines, that raises the presumption that they didn't do anything wrong. I think you have to have a system of primary preventive clinics in our inner cities and our rural areas so people can have access to health care.
But the key is to control the costs and maintain the quality. To do that, you need a system of managed competition where all of us are covered in big groups, and we can choose our doctors and our hospitals from a wide range, but there is an incentive to control costs. And I think there has to be -- I think Mr. Perot and I agree on this -- there has to be a national commission of health care providers and health care consumers that set ceilings to keep health costs in line with inflation plus population growth.
Now, let me say, some people say we can't do this, but Hawaii does it. They cover 98 percent of their people, and their insurance premiums are much cheaper than the rest of America. So does Rochester, New York. They now have a plan to cover everybody, and their premiums are two-thirds the rest of the country. This is very important. It's a big human problem and a devastating economic problem for America. I'm going to send a plan to do this within the first 100 days of my Presidency. It's terribly important.

One brief point. We have elections so people can make decisions about this. The point I want to make to you is, a bipartisan commission reviewed my plan and the Bush plan and concluded -- there were as many Republicans as Democratic health care experts on it -- they concluded that my plan would cover everybody, and his would leave 27 million behind by the year 2000, and that my plan in the next 12 years would save $2.2 trillion in public and private money to reinvest in this economy. The average family would save $1,200 a year under the plan that I offered, without any erosion in the quality of health care. So I ask you to look at that.
You have to vote for somebody with a plan. That's what you have elections for. If people say, "Well, he got elected to do this," and then the Congress says, "Okay, I'm going to do it." That's what the election was about.

Tell me how it's affected you again? You know people who have lost their jobs and lost their homes?

Well, I've been Governor of a small State for 12 years. I'll tell you how it's affected me. Every year, Congress and the President sign laws that make us do more things; it gives us less money to do it with. I see people in my State, middle class people, their taxes have gone up from Washington and their services have gone down, while the wealthy have gotten tax cuts.
I have seen what's happened in this last 4 years when, in my State, when people lose their jobs there's a good chance I'll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them. And I've been out here for 13 months, meeting in meetings just like this ever since October with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance.
What I want you to understand is, the national debt is not the only cause of that. It is because America has not invested in its people. It is because we have not grown. It is because we've had 12 years of trickle-down economics. We've gone from 1st to 12th in the world in wages. We've had 4 years where we've produced no private sector jobs. Most people are working harder for less money than they were making 10 years ago. It is because we are in the grip of a failed economic theory. And this decision you're about to make better be about what kind of economic theory you want, not just people saying, "I want to go fix it," but what are we going to do.
What I think we have to do is invest in American jobs, in American education, control American health care costs, and bring the American people together again.

I think I remember the question. Let me say first of all, I want to answer your specific question, but first of all, we all agree that there should be a growing economy. What you have to decide is who's got the best economic plan. We all have ideas out there, and Mr. Bush has a record. I don't want you to read my lips, and I sure don't want you to read his. I do hope you will read our plans.

On Medicare, it is not true that everyone knows how to fix it; there are different ideas. The Bush plan, the Perot plan, the Clinton -- we have different ideas. I am convinced, having studied health care for a year, hard, and talking to hundreds and hundreds of people all across America, that you cannot control the costs of Medicare until you control the cost of private health care and public health care with managed competition, ceiling on cost, and radical reorganization of the insurance markets. You've got to do that. We've got to get those costs down.
Number two, with regard to Social Security, that program, a lot of you may not know this: It produces a $70 billion surplus a year. Social Security is in surplus $70 billion. Six increases in the payroll tax -- that means people with incomes of $51,000 a year or less pay a disproportionately high share of the Federal tax burden, which is why I want some middle class tax relief.
What do we have to do? By the time the century turns, we have got to have our deficit under control, we have to work out of so that surplus is building up, so when the baby boomers like me retire, we're okay.
Number three, on the pension funds, I don't know as much about it, but I will say this: What I will do is to bring in the pension experts of the country, take a look at it, and strengthen the pension requirements further, because it's not just enough to have the guarantee. We had a guarantee on the S&L's, right? We had a guarantee, and what happened? You picked up a $500 billion bill because of the dumb way the Federal Government deregulated it. So I think we are going to have to change and strengthen the pension requirements on private retirement plans.

I'd rather answer her question first, and then I'll be glad to, because the question you ask is important. The end of the cold war brings an incredible opportunity for change, the winds of freedom blowing around the world, Russia demilitarizing. It also requires us to maintain some continuity, some bipartisan American commitment to certain principles.
I would just say there are three things that I would like to say. Number one, we do have to maintain the world's strongest defense. We may differ about what the elements of that are. I think the defense needs to be with fewer people and permanent armed services, but with greater mobility on the land, in the air, and on the sea, with a real dedication to continuing development of high-technology weaponry and well-trained people. I think we're going to have to work to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We've got to keep going until all those nuclear weapons in Russia are gone and the other Republics.
Number two, if you don't rebuild the economic strength of this country at home, we won't be a superpower. We can't have any more instances like what happened when Mr. Bush went to Japan and the Japanese Prime Minister said he felt sympathy for our country. We have to be the strongest economic power in the world. That's what got me into this race, so we could rebuild the American economy.
Number three, we need to be a force for freedom and democracy. We need to use our unique position to support freedom, whether it's in Haiti or in China or in any other place, wherever the seeds of freedom are sprouting. We can't impose it, but we need to nourish it. That's the kind of thing that I would do as President, follow those three commitments into the future.

First of all, let me say that I've spent more of my time in life on this in the last 12 years than any other issue. Seventy percent of my State's money goes to public schools. I was really honored when Time magazine said that our schools have shown more improvement than any other State in the country except one other. They named two States showing real strides forward in the eighties. So I care a lot about this, and I've spent countless hours in schools.
But let me start with what you've said. I agree with some of what Mr. Bush said, but it's nowhere near enough. We live in a world where what you earn depends on what you can learn, where the average 18-year-old will change jobs eight times in a lifetime, and where none of us can promise any of you that what you now do for a living is absolutely safe from now on. Nobody running can promise that. There's too much change in the world.
So what should we do? Let me reel some things off real quick, because you said you wanted specifics. Number one, under my program we would provide matching funds to States to teach everybody with a job to read in the next 5 years and give everybody with a job a chance to get a high school diploma, in big places, on the job.
Number two, we would provide 2-year apprenticeship programs to high school graduates who don't go to college, in community colleges or on the job.
Number three, we'd open the doors to college education to high school graduates without regard to income. They could borrow the money and pay it back as a percentage of their income over the couple of years of service to our Nation here home.
Number four, we would fully fund the Head Start program to get little kids off to a good start.
Five, I would have an aggressive program of school reform. More choices in the -- I favor public schools or these new charter schools. We can talk about that if you want. I don't think we should spend tax money on private schools, but I favor public school choice. I favor radical decentralization in giving more power to better trained principals and teachers with parent councils to control their schools. Those things would revolutionize American education and take us to the top economically.

In 6 years I budget all this in my budget. In 6 years, the college program would cost $8 billion over and above what -- the present student loan program costs 4. You pay $3 billion for busted loans, because we don't have an automatic recovery system, and a billion dollars in bank fees. So the net cost will be $8 billion 6 years from now, in a trillion-plus budget: not very much.
The other stuff, all the other stuff I mentioned costs much less than that. The Head Start program, full funding, would cost about $5 billion more. It's all covered in my budget from the plans that I've laid out, from raising taxes on families with incomes above $200,000, and asking foreign corporations to pay the same tax that American corporations do on the same income; from $140 billion in budget cuts, including what I think are very prudent cuts in the defense budget. It's all covered in the plan.

Very briefly. Involving the parents in the preschool education of their kids, even if they're poor and uneducated, can make a huge difference. We have a big program in my State that teaches mothers or fathers to teach their kids to get ready for school. It's the most successful thing we've ever done.
Just a fact clarification real quickly. We do not spend a higher percentage of our income on public education than every other country. There are nine countries that spend more than we do on public education. We spend more on education because we spend so much more on colleges. But if you look at public education alone, and you take into account that we have more racial diversity and more poverty, it makes a big difference. There are great public schools where there are public school choice, accountability, and brilliant principals. I'll just mention one, the Beasley Academic Center in Chicago. I commend it to anybody. It's as good as any private school in the country.

Well, I don't have any idea, but I hope it will happen sometime in my lifetime.

I believe that this country is electing more and more African-Americans and Latinos and Asian-Americans who are representing districts that are themselves not necessarily of a majority of their race. The American people are beginning to vote across racial lines, and I hope it will happen more and more.
More and more women are being elected. Look at all these women Senate candidates we have here. You know, according to my mother and my wife and my daughter, this world would be a lot better place if women were running it most of the time.
I do think there are special experiences and judgments and backgrounds and understandings that women bring to this process, by the way. This lady said here, how have you been affected by the economy? I mean, women know what it's like to be paid an unequal amount for equal work; they know what's it like not to have flexible working hours; they know what it's like not to have family leave or child care. So I think it would be a good thing for America if it happened, and I think it will happen in my lifetime.

Thank you, Carole, and thank you, ladies and gentleman. Since I suggested this format, I hope it's been good for all of you. I've really tried to be faithful to your request that we answer the questions specifically and pointedly. I thought I owed that to you. And I respect you for being here, and for the impact you've had on making this a more positive experience.
These problems are not easy. They're not going to be solved overnight. But I want you to think about just two or three things. First of all, the people of my State have let me be their Governor for 12 years because I made commitments to two things, more jobs and better schools.
Our schools are now better. Our children get off to a better start, from preschool programs and smaller classes in the early grades. We have one of the most aggressive adult education programs in the country. We talked about that.
This year, my State ranks first in the country in job growth, fourth in manufacturing job growth, fourth in income growth, fourth in the decline of poverty. I'm proud of that. It happened because I could work with people, Republicans and Democrats. That's why we've had 24 retired generals and admirals, hundreds of business people, many of them Republican, support this campaign.
You have to decide whether you want to change or not. We do not need 4 more years of an economic theory that doesn't work. We've had 12 years of trickle-down economics. It's time to put the American people first, to invest and grow this economy. I'm the only person here who's ever balanced a government budget, and I've presented 12 of them and cut spending repeatedly. But you cannot just get there by balancing the budget. We've got to grow the economy by putting people first, real people like you.
I got into this race because I did not want my child to grow up to be part of the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents. We're better than that. We can do better than that. I want to make America as great as it can be, and I ask for your help in doing it.
Thank you very much.