Excerpts: Candidates Clash Over the Economy, Taxes, Iraq

Following are excerpts from Monday’s presidential debate at Michigan State University in East Lansing:

Economic Plans

Bill Clinton: “. . . There are many people who believe that the only way we can get this country turned around is to tax the middle class more and punish them more. But the truth is that middle-class Americans are the only group who have been taxed more in the 1980s and during the last 12 years, even though their incomes have gone down. The wealthiest Americans have been taxed much less, even though their incomes have gone up.

“Middle-class people will have their fair share of changing to do, and many challenges to face, including the challenge of becoming constantly re-educated. But, my plan is a departure from trickle-down economics, just cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and getting out of the way. It’s also a departure from tax-and-spend economics, because you can’t tax and divide an economy that isn’t growing.

“I propose an American version of what works in other countries. I think we can do it better--invest and grow. . . .”

President Bush: “Well, he doesn’t like trickle-down government, but I think he’s talking about the Reagan-Bush years, where we created 15 million jobs. The rich are paying a bigger percent of the total tax burden.

“And what I don’t like is trickle-down government. And therein, I think, Gov. Clinton keeps talking about trickle down, trickle down, and he’s still talking about spending more and taxing more. . . .

“Mr. and Mrs. America, when you hear him say: ‘We’re going to tax only the rich,’ watch your wallet because his figures don’t add up, and he’s going to sock it right to the middle-class taxpayer and lower if he’s going to pay for all the spending programs he proposed.”

Ross Perot: “The basic problem with it--it doesn’t balance the budget. If you forecast it out we still have a significant deficit under each of their plans, as I understand them. . . .

“There’s only one way out of this and that is to stop the deterioration of our job base, to have a growing, expanding job base to give us the tax base.

“See, balancing the budget is not nearly as difficult as paying off the $4-trillion debt and leaving our children the American dream intact. We have spent their money. We’ve got to pay it back. This is going to take fair, shared sacrifice. . . .”

Trade Agreements

Bush: “. . . Ross says, with great conviction, he opposes the North American Free Trade Agreement. I’m for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“My problem with Gov. Clinton, once again, is that one time he’s going to make up his mind he will see some merit in it, but then he sees a lot of wrong with it.

“Then the other day he says he’s for it. However, then we’ve got to pass other legislation. When you’re President of the United States, you cannot have this pattern of saying: ‘Well, I’m for it, but I’m on the other side of it . . .’

”. . . I think free trade is going to expand our job opportunity. I think it is exports that have saved us when we’re in a global slowdown, a connected global slowdown, a recession in some countries. And it’s free trade, fair trade, that needs to be our hallmark, and we need more free trade agreements, not fewer.”

Clinton: “. . . I am the one who’s in the middle on this. Mr. Perot says it’s a bad deal. Mr. Bush says it’s a hunky-dory deal. I say on balance it does more good than harm if--if we can get some protection for the environment so that the Mexicans have to follow their own environmental standards, their own labor law standards, and if we have a genuine commitment to re-educate and retrain the American workers who lose their jobs and reinvest in this economy. I have a realistic approach to trade. . . .”

Perot: “You implement that NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls, etc., etc., etc., and you are going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country right at a time when we need the tax base to pay the debt and pay down the interest on the debt and get our house back in order. We’ve got to proceed very carefully on that. . . .

“Our country has sold out to foreign lobbyists.

“We don’t have free trade. Both parties have foreign lobbyists on leave in key roles in their campaigns, and if there’s anything more unwise than that, I don’t know what it is. . . .”

Bush: “Most people that are lobbying are lobbying the Congress. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an honest person who happens to represent an interest of another country from making his case. That’s the American way. . . .”

Clinton: “I think Ross is right in that we do need some more restrictions on lobbyists. We ought to make them disclose the people they’ve given money to when they’re testifying before congressional committees. We ought to close the lawyer’s loophole. . . .”

Clinton and the Military

Clinton: “. . . I was opposed to the (Vietnam War). I couldn’t help that. I felt very strongly about it, and I didn’t want to go at the time. It’s easy to say, in retrospect, I would have done something differently.

“President Lincoln opposed the war, and there were people who said maybe he shouldn’t be President. But I think he made us a pretty good President in wartime. We’ve had a lot of other presidents who didn’t wear their country’s uniform, who had to order our young soldiers into battle, including President Wilson and President Roosevelt.

”. . . I wouldn’t relish doing it, but I wouldn’t shrink from it. I think that the President has to be prepared to use the power of the nation when our vital interests are threatened, when our treaty commitments are at stake, when we know that something has to be done that is in the national interest, and that is a part of being President.

“Could I do it? Yes, I could.”

Bush: “. . . They have not been forthcoming. He got a deferment or he didn’t. He got a notice or he didn’t. And I think it’s this pattern that troubles me more than the draft. A lot of decent, honorable people felt as he did on the draft, but it is this pattern. . . .

“That’s my big difference with him on the draft. It wasn’t failing to serve.”

Perot: “. . . I look on this as history. I don’t look on it personally as relevant, and I consider it really a waste of time tonight when you consider the issues that face our country right now.”

Prewar Policy on Iraq

Perot: “. . . Now, let’s go back to Saddam Hussein.

“We gave Ambassador (April) Glaspie written instructions. That’s a fact. We’ve never let the Congress and the Foreign Relations, Senate Intelligence Committee see them. That’s a fact. . . .

“So I say this is very simple: Saddam Hussein released a tape, as you know, claiming it was a transcript of their meeting, where she said: ‘We will not become involved in your border dispute,’ and, in effect, ‘you can take the northern part of the country.’

“We later said: ‘No, that’s not true.’ I said: ‘Well, this is simple. What were her written instructions?’ We guard those like the secrets to the atomic bomb, literally.

“Now I say, whose country is this? This is ours. Who will get hurt if we lay those papers on the table? The worst thing is . . . again, it’s a mistake. Nobody did any of this with evil intent. I just object to the fact that we cover up and hide things. . . .”

Clinton: “Let’s take Mr. Bush, for the moment, at his word. He’s right. We don’t have any evidence, at least, that our government did tell Saddam Hussein he could have that part of Kuwait, and let’s give him the credit he deserves for organizing Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield. It was a remarkable event. . . .

“All right. The war’s over. We know (Hussein’s) dropping mustard gas on his own people. We know he’s threatened to incinerate half of Israel. Several government departments--several--had information that he was converting our aid to military purposes and trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, but in late ‘89, the President signed a secret policy saying we were going to continue to try to improve relations with him, and we sent him some sort of communication on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait that we still wanted better relations.

“So I think what was wrong--I give credit where credit is due, but the responsibility was in coddling Saddam Hussein when there was no reason to do it and when people at high levels in our government knew he was trying to do things that were outrageous.”

Bush: “Well, it’s awful easy when you’re dealing with 90-90 hindsight. We did try to bring Saddam Hussein into the family of nations. He did have the fourth-largest army. . . .

“And we formed a historic coalition and we brought him down, and we destroyed the fourth-largest army, and the battlefield was searched, and there wasn’t one single iota of evidence that any U.S. weapons were on that battlefield and the nuclear capability has been searched by the United Nations, and there hasn’t been one single scintilla of evidence that there’s any U.S. technology involved in it.

“And what you’re seeing on all this Iraqgate is a bunch of people who were wrong on the war trying to cover their necks here and try to do a little revisionism, and I cannot let that stand, because it isn’t true. . . .”

Tax Proposals

Clinton: “. . . My plan says that we want to raise marginal incomes on family incomes above $200,000 from 31% to 36%; that we want to ask foreign corporations simply to pay the same percentage of taxes on their income that American corporations pay in America; that we want to use that money to provide over $100 billion in tax cuts for investment in new plant and equipment for small business, for new technologies and for middle-class tax relief.

“Now, I’ll tell you this: I will not raise taxes on the middle class to pay for these programs. If the money does not come in there to pay for these programs, we will cut other government spending, or we will slow down the phase-in of the programs. . . .

“Now, furthermore, I am not going to tell you, ‘Read my lips,’ on anything, because I cannot foresee what emergencies might develop in this country. And the President said never, never, never would he ever raise taxes. And in New Jersey, within a day, Marlin Fitzwater, his spokesman, said: ‘Now, that’s not a promise. . . .’ ”

Bush: “(Clinton) would do for the United States what he’s done for Arkansas. We do not want to be the lowest of the low. We are not a nation in decline. We are a rising nation.

“Now, my problem is I heard what he said. He said: ‘I want to take it from the rich--raise $150 billion from the rich.’ To get it, to get $150 billion in new taxes you’ve got to go down to the guy that’s making $36,600. And if you want to pay for the rest of his plan--all the other spending programs, you’re going to sock it to the working man.

“So when you hear ‘tax the rich,’ Mr. and Mrs. America, watch your wallet. Lock your wallet, because he’s coming right after you, just like Jimmy Carter did, and just like you’re going to get--you’re going to end up with interest rates at 21%, and you’re going to have inflation going through the roof.

“Yes, we’re having tough times, but we do not need to go back to the failed policies of the past when you had a Democratic President and a spendthrift Democratic Congress.”

Perot: “What we need is people to stop talking and start doing. Now, our real problem here is, they both have plans that will not work. . . .

“So let’s come back to harsh reality and what I--you know, everybody says: ‘Gee, Perot, you’re tough.’ I’m saying: ‘Well, this is not as tough as World War II and it’s not as tough as the Revolution.’ And it’s fair share and sacrifice to do the right thing for our country and for our children, and it will be fun if we all work together to do it.”