[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[May 10, 1993]
[Pages 610-614]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Question-and-Answer Session With the Cleveland City Club
May 10, 1993

Homosexuals in the Military

    Q. Mr. President, based on the congressional hearings so far, how do 
you expect to resolve the issue of gays in the military this July?
    The President. I can only tell you what I think should be done and 
what my guess is will be done. And I'm glad you asked this question.
    Let me say one thing by way of background. The difference between my 
position and that of many people in the military, including most folks 
in the military, is over a very narrow category of people, actually. 
That is, in the last few months, the armed services have, on their own 
initiative after meeting with me, stopped asking people when they join 
up whether they are homosexual or not. That is not being asked anymore. 
For many years that question was not asked. It only started being asked 
in the relatively recent past. That will solve most of the problems.
    I do not propose any changes in the code of military conduct. None. 
Zero. I do not believe that anything should be done in terms of behavior 
that would undermine unit cohesion or morale. Nothing.
    Here is what this whole debate is about. It is about whether someone 
should be able to acknowledge, if asked or otherwise, homosexuality and 
do nothing else, do nothing to violate the code of military conduct and 
not be kicked out of the service. And my position is yes. Others say no. 
Others say if you let someone acknowledge it, it amounts to legitimizing 
a lifestyle or putting it on a par with--I don't see it as that. I just 
believe that there ought to be a presumption that people ought to be 
able to serve their country unless they do something wrong. But you need 
to know, that is it is not such a big difference. That is what we're 
arguing about. We're arguing not about any kind of conduct but about 
whether people can acknowledge that. Like that young man who was the 6th 
Army soldier of the year and who's now about to be mustered out because 
he acknowledged being homosexual.
    It is not about asking the American people to approve a lifestyle, 
to embrace it, to elevate it, anything else. The question is if you 
accept as a fact, as we now know and as the Pentagon has said, there 
have been many, many thousands of homosexuals serve our country and 
serve it well with distinction, should we stop asking? They say yes, and 
I say yes. So we solved most of the issues. They say yes, and I say yes.
    Should we change the code of conduct? They say no, and I say no, not 
at all, not on the base, not any way, no changes in the code of conduct. 
So the issue is over this: What will happen in this narrow category of 
cases? And that is what is still to be resolved. I hope my position will 
prevail. Frankly, I think most people believe as a practical matter, 
most people who have studied it, that the position I have taken can be 
worked out and is fairest to the good men and women who serve in the 
service who have done well. I think they're frankly worried about having 
that position look like they are embracing a lifestyle or legitimizing a 
lifestyle they don't agree with. And I keep saying, ``That's not what I 
think we're about.'' What I think we're about is acknowledging people's 
right to do right and to be judged by what they do. And that's sort of 
my position.

Economic Program

    Q. Mr. President, as a resident of Ohio, what action can I take, 
what can I do to express my outrage at Senator Dole and his cohorts who 
block a legitimate vote like the stimulus

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package?
    The President.  Let me make a constructive suggestion. I appreciate 
your sentiments, obviously, but let me make a constructive suggestion. 
What I think we need to do is to go on now and pass this budget and then 
just see where we are.
    Let me back up and say what I think happened in that deal. I believe 
that I won the debate with the American people that we needed more 
investments to create some jobs now, because this economy is not 
producing a lot of jobs. On the other hand, the Republicans said, 
``Well, that's fine, but we ought to pay for it.''
    Well, I had announced this stimulus program as a part of this 5-year 
deficit-reduction program. So it had already been incorporated by the 
financial markets and everybody else who evaluated this. It was paid for 
in the sense that it was part of the program. But to pass it in time to 
get the summer jobs and some other things out, we had to, in effect, 
take it out of sequence, if you see what I mean, to put it up now so we 
can get the money out to create the jobs in 1993 before Congress could 
have actually acted on the budget of which it was but a small part.
    So what I think, to be constructive, what I think you should do is 
to do whatever you can to encourage the big budget to pass, long-term 
deficit reduction, and investment increases. Then let's watch this 
unemployment rate. And once we have proved that we have the discipline 
in Washington to cut spending and reduce the deficit, if we don't 
generate new jobs, if the economy doesn't pick up in terms of 
employment, then I think we can come back and look at that.
    Now, that doesn't solve a couple of the severe problems, like the 
summer jobs. We're still trying to assess where we are on that. But the 
larger question of creating jobs is something that I think that we need 
to recognize is primarily going to be dealt with by the big budget, the 
big issue. But if we need to come back, then I'll need you and all your 
folks, because we need to get ahead of the curve on this one. Because we 
were not trying to increase the deficit, this was part of a big, 5-year 
plan where we had to take it out of sequence because of the summer jobs 
issue and because we wanted a lot of these jobs created in 1993.
    Thank you for asking.

National Service Program

    Q. What is your prognosis for the success of your proposed aid for 
college students who do public service?
    The President. Oh, I think it's got very great prospects of success. 
We've had wonderful bipartisan support; for several Republican 
Congressmen in the House of Representatives already asked to be 
cosponsors. We have at least two supporters, Republican supporters, in 
the Senate. And as far as I know, virtually every Democrat is for it.
    We've worked very hard to try to work out all of the objections, and 
I think it will be very helpful. We're going to move as quickly as 
possible. The national service part I think will fly through. The 
question of cutting down on the cost of the loan program will be more 
difficult, because many of the bankers and others who like the system as 
it is will oppose it. But it's unconscionable for us to lose $3 billion 
a year on loan defaults and $1 billion on transaction fees which could 
be put into direct loans which could then be collected. So there will be 
a lot of dispute about the loan issue. But I think the national service 
part of it will go through. It wouldn't hurt for you to express your 
support, though, to your Member of Congress.
    Thank you.

Environmental Initiatives

    Q. Mr. President, what legislations do you hope to pass in order to 
help protect the environment while cutting the national deficit?
    The President. There are several things that we want to do. As you 
know, the Vice President and I have both worked very hard on this issue 
since we took office. I want to sign the biodiversity treaty, and I 
expect to do it, committing the United States to help preserve wildlife 
species. We want to be part of an international effort to preserve 
wildlife and plant life in the United States and in the rainforest, 
especially, around the world. We want to reduce the emissions of 
greenhouse gases in this country to 1990 levels over this coming decade, 
which I think we can do.
    And we want to invest some of the money that is coming from defense 
cutbacks into environmental technologies and environmental cleanup here 
at home, so that those technologies can produce American jobs, many of 
which can also lead in exporting. The biggest new commercial market in 
the world in the next 10 years

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will be the market for various environmental technologies and services. 
It is a huge gold mine out there waiting to be tapped. When the 
countries met in Rio last year, regrettably the Germans and the Japanese 
were much ahead of the United States in total in environmental 
technology companies and services. But we have a lot of very successful 
ones here in the United States, and I hope we can galvanize more of 
them. If we do this right, cleaning up the environment won't cost us 
jobs, it'll save us jobs. It'll have a big positive impact.
    He asked a good question. Give him a hand. Isn't he good. [Applause] 
Thank you.

Health Care Reform

    Q. Mr. President, perhaps this is a bit premature. But does your 
health care program incorporate a focus on wellness as well as merely 
curing illnesses? And what I mean by wellness is universal immunization, 
health examinations, and so forth. Or, perhaps Mrs. Clinton might answer 
that a little bit better. [Laughter]
    The President. Well, let me say that it will, and that if it were 
just up to the two of us, it would focus on wellness much more. You may 
know that, for example, there are a lot of countries, in France for 
example, where even working-class families get a family allowance when a 
woman is pregnant. You can only draw the family allowance if the mother 
can prove that she has followed a certain regime of maternal health 
designed to produce a healthy baby.
    I saw the other day in the paper that some Republican Congressman 
had suggested that we ought to do the same thing with immunizations, for 
people on public assistance having to immunize their kids. I thought 
that was a good idea. I think that we should have a big wellness 
prevention component of this. That's another point I wish I had made in 
my remarks. But we are exploring what our options are there.
    There will be every effort made to have a strong education and 
prevention and wellness component of this health care effort. And I 
might add that if we can have more clinics in chronically underserved 
areas and more health educators there, I think we can do that. That's 
one way you can save a ton of money in the system, and I think you must 
know that or you would not have asked the question.
    Thank you.

Taxes

    Q. Mr. President, your administration has proposed two new taxes: 
first, a value-added tax in which goods would be taxed at each stage of 
production; secondly, an energy Btu tax in which coal, gas, oil, and 
other forms of energy would be taxed at each stage of use. Are not these 
taxes inflationary in that they compound at each stage? And secondly, 
they push up the consumer price index to which wages, prices, and Social 
Security and other entitlements are indexed to the consumer price index.
    The President. Well, first, let me say I have proposed a Btu tax, 
and I'd like to come back to that. I have not proposed a VAT tax. I have 
not. There have been a lot of rumors about it.
    It's interesting that you should know with whom a VAT tax is 
popular. Hillary's health care group, the First Lady's health care 
group, was asked to consider a VAT tax by an unusual coalition of big 
business and labor interests. Why? Because other countries have a VAT 
tax. Most other countries have a VAT tax of some kind, and we don't. And 
a value-added tax is one of the few ways that you can--somebody who 
advocated it now wants to get off of it. [Laughter] Anyway, a value-
added tax is one of the few ways that you can avoid taxing your own 
exports and tax someone else's imports. That is, it is placed on things 
sold in your country. So when our competitors in Europe, for example, 
have a value-added tax, when they produce things for sale in the United 
States, it's not subject to the tax. When we sell our stuff over there, 
it's already carried the full burden of our taxes, and it gets hit with 
the VAT.
    So there are a lot of business and labor interests who believe that, 
conceptually, even if we lower some other tax, we should embrace the VAT 
tax because it helps us in international trade. I had never thought of 
it as an answer to the health care problem, because I thought it would 
aggravate the maldistribution of paying for the problem. It would 
allocate the burden of paying for the problem in ways that I didn't 
think were particularly fair. But that's what it is.
    Now, on the Btu tax, let me say that America taxes energy less than 
any other country. There were a lot of suggestions for how we might 
raise funds to reduce the deficit. The energy tax clearly is the thing 
which, for all kinds of

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reasons, had the biggest impact on the financial markets.
    I was reluctant--there were people who said, ``Well, you ought to 
have a carbon tax. That's the most polluting.'' I thought that was 
unfair to the coal-producing States. Then there were people who said, 
``Well, we have real low gas taxes.'' We do, but States also set gas 
taxes. ``We have real low gas taxes. You ought to have a gas tax.'' I 
thought that was unfair to the rural areas, particularly west of the 
Mississippi where they have much higher per-vehicle usage.
    The reason we decided to go with the Btu tax is that you can put it 
uniformly on all sources of energy so that it doesn't fall with 
incredible disproportion on any given sector. Now, the problem is that 
for the sectors that are especially energy-intensive, it hurts them more 
than a gas tax. And it hurts people who don't pay anything for their 
energy now. So farmers, for example, that had a fuel tax exemption are 
dealing with this burden. And you know, we've tried to come to grips 
with that. I don't think there is a perfect solution. But I like the Btu 
tax, because it promotes energy conservation, it's good for the 
environment, and it's fairer, I think, to every region than any other 
energy alternative that we could devise.
    Let me follow up on that. We tried to increase the earned-income tax 
credit--that is, the proposal--so that for people with earnings of 
$29,000 a year or less, $30,000 a year or less with families, the impact 
of the Btu tax would be offset by the increase they'd get in the tax cut 
under the earned-income tax credit.

Economic Program

    Q. Good afternoon, Mr. President.
    The President. Good afternoon.
    Q. What I'd like to know is, first of all, your economic plan is 
twofold. It is to cut spending and, secondly, to encourage more 
Government spending in the private sector. Well, obviously there's a lot 
of support for the first part, cutting spending. What I'd like to know 
is, there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm for the second part. One is: 
How do you plan to get that through? Basically, how do you plan to 
garner more support for it? And, once you get your economic package 
through, how much input are just ordinary people going to have to this? 
And when will we feel it at our level?
    The President. Well, depending on whether you borrowed any money 
since November, you've already felt it. From the minute Secretary-
designate of the Treasury said after the election, Lloyd Bentsen said we 
were going to attack the deficit and how we were going to do it and what 
was going to be in it, we began to have pretty steep drops in interest 
rates. So if you're paying any kind of interest payments, you've already 
felt it.
    The reason I was for the job stimulus program--to go back to the 
jobs program that the gentleman asked me in the back--is that I wanted 
to be able to lower the unemployment rate by another half a percentage 
point this year through an investment program, because all over the 
world, I will say again, all over the world--Europe's got a higher 
unemployment rate than we do. Japan has a much lower unemployment rate 
than we do because it's got a more closed economy, but they also are not 
creating jobs, and many of their firms are laying off for the first time 
in modern history. So I wanted to do that.
    So you will--let me just tick them off--you should be able--if we 
pass the budget, I think we will secure a healthier financial 
environment for the next year, and I think that will help everyone. If 
we can pass health care, I think, by next year people will begin to feel 
the impact of greater health security. If we can pass it--it's a big job 
and it's going to take a lot of work.
    The student loan program, if it passes, it will affect people 
immediately. People will be eligible who are now in college for it, as 
well as those who would wish to go, the same thing with the 
apprenticeship program. The welfare reform program should begin to have 
effect next year. Those are just some of the things that I think will 
actually touch people's lives and make a big difference.
    I think the trick on--to go back to the question the other gentleman 
asked--to getting people to support the targeted spending for education, 
training, and technology is to make sure that you lock the spending cuts 
in first before you do the taxes, and that overall, that the spending 
increases are small compared to the spending cuts, which they are, in 
our plan. So I think to me, that's the trick, and that's what I'm trying 
to achieve, and I hope you'll be with

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me when we do it.
    Thank you.

Note: The question-and-answer session began at 1:50 p.m. in the Statler 
Tower Building.