[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 5, 1994]
[Pages 581-597]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in a Town Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina
April 5, 1994

    Q. Welcome, Mr. President.
    The President. Thank you. I'm hooked up.
    Tom Donovan. Right. We will be getting to our first question for 
President Clinton, but first he would like to begin with some opening 
remarks.
    Mr. President.
    The President. Thank you. Well, first of all, I want to thank you 
for hosting this town meeting. And I want to thank all of you for 
participating and all the people in the communities that are hooked into 
us tonight. I try to do a number of these every year as a way of sort of 
getting in closer touch with the American people, listening to people 
directly about their concerns, and making a report.
    Last year, in my first year as President, I devoted most of my time 
to trying to get the economy back in order, to impose some discipline on 
the Federal budget, and to start investing in growth for the jobs of the 
21st century. This year we are working on trying to keep that economic 
renewal going. Our economy in 14 months has produced 2.3 million private 
sector jobs. That's more than twice as many as in the previous 4 years. 
If the budget which I have proposed to Congress passes, we will 
eliminate another 100 Government programs, cut another 200 and something 
more,

[[Page 582]]

and have 3 years of reduction in the Federal deficit for the first time 
since Harry Truman was President of the United States. That's a long 
time. So we're moving in the right direction.
    This year we're also trying to improve our political system. We've 
got a lobby reform law which will restrict lobbying in Washington and 
increase reporting requirements for lobbyists, which I think is a very 
good thing.
    The Congress just passed and I just signed our major education bill 
for public education, Goals 2000, which for the first time will set 
world-class standards of excellence for our public schools and promote 
all kinds of domestic grassroots reforms, school district by school 
district, to achieve them.
    We are dealing with welfare reform in the Congress. We are dealing 
with health care reform, and I know a lot of you have questions about 
that. I visited today in Troy, North Carolina, in a rural hospital and 
with people in that community, talking about the problems of providing 
health care in rural America.
    And the first item of business--and I will close with this--when the 
Congress comes back will be to take up the crime bill. I know you just 
had a special legislative session here in North Carolina. Governor Hunt 
proposed some legislation. Our crime bill will put another 100,000 
police officers on the street, will ban 28 kinds of assault weapons, 
will have a ``three strikes and you're out'' provision to affect the 
relatively small number of criminals that commit a large percentage of 
the truly violent crimes, and will provide some funds to communities to 
try to give our kids a chance to avoid getting in real trouble: more 
funds for drug treatment, for recreation, for alternatives to 
imprisonment for first-time offenders. It's going to be a very busy year 
in Congress.
    What I want you to know is that this work is going on. Sometimes I 
think maybe out here in the country, because of what comes across the 
airwaves, you may not know that the work of the people is going on, and 
that's my first concern. And we're doing everything we can to push an 
agenda which would make this year, if we can complete it, even more 
important to the American people and their future than what happened 
last year.
    Mr. Donovan. Mr. President, we will open up our town hall meeting 
now with questions, and Kim Hindrew is standing by with the first 
questioner.

Anticrime Efforts

[Kim Hindrew introduced a participant who asked about funds for inner-
city anticrime programs.]

    The President. Yes, there are. Let me just explain a little bit 
about how our crime bill works. This crime bill would do far more than 
Congress has often done in the past. It's not just a posturing bill, 
where we say we're getting tougher on crime but we don't give the cities 
and the rural areas the means to deal with it. We actually would put 
another 100,000 police officers on the street in our cities over the 
next 5 years in community policing, that is, where people could walk the 
streets, know their neighbors, know the kids, work with people, and 
prevent crime as well as catch criminals. We provide the communities 
funds to help to promote more community activities for young people, to 
help to provide for afterschool activities, for jobs, for recreational 
activities, for drug treatment, for the kinds of things that will 
prevent crime, as well as for boot camps and other alternatives to 
prison for first-time offenders who are nonviolent. And as I said, we do 
increase penalties for the relatively small number of people who commit 
a large number of the violent crimes. And we eliminate several--28, to 
be exact--kinds of assault weapons which have no hunting or sporting 
purpose, which are just used to make sure that gang members are often 
better armed than police officers.
    So that's what this crime bill does. And it's all paid for not with 
a tax increase but with a trust fund which will be funded by reducing 
the Federal employment rolls by 252,000 over 5 years, not by firing 
anybody but by attrition. If this budget passes, this year's budget, 
combined with what we did last year, 5 years from my first year in 
office the Federal Government of the United States will be as small as 
it was when John Kennedy was President. It will be the smallest it has 
been in 30 years, which is a huge change. And all the money will be put 
right back into local communities and into law enforcement. So that's 
what we're going to do. It will make a difference, sir.

[[Page 583]]

Health Care Reform

[Ms. Hindrew introduced a participant who questioned the proposed health 
care program in light of Government inefficiency in the operation of 
programs such as Medicare and VA hospitals.]

    The President. Well, that's why I don't propose that the Government 
take it over. My program is, guaranteed private insurance. My program 
is, take the people who are working who don't have health insurance and 
extend the same system that they have now. Eighty percent of the people 
without health insurance in America today are in working families, and 
what we propose to do is to guarantee them private insurance and then 
give them the chance to choose their own doctor, choose their own 
medical plan, and to have a new choice every year, not to have the 
Government run it.
    But let me just say, sir, I don't agree with you. I don't think 
Medicare is a poorly run program at all. And the Medicare program, I 
think, has worked right well. It only has a 3 percent administrative 
cost. By contrast, most private insurance plans have administrative 
costs 4 and 5 and 6 times that. So I don't think you can make a very 
good case of Medicare's not well run. I think it is. Medicaid is growing 
so fast and Medicare is growing so fast in part because there are more 
and more people on it because we don't have enough other kinds of 
insurance. But I don't think that either one of those programs, but 
particularly the Medicare program, is poorly managed. I think Medicare 
works real well for elderly people, and I think it ought to be left 
alone. Under my plan we leave it alone just as it is. But we don't 
extend Medicare to the uninsured, we extend private insurance. I think 
we should have a private plan.
    I do believe that you're going to have to have some way to let small 
business people and self-employed people buy health insurance at the 
same competitive rates that people in the Government and people in big 
business get it now. Those of us that are in the Federal Government have 
terrific health insurance plans. Why? Because there's a whole lot of us, 
so we can get good plans. But farmers or self-employed people or small 
business people, they pay 35 to 40 percent more because they don't have 
any buying power. So under our system, what the Government does is to 
create buying pools, almost like old-fashioned farmers co-ops, so that 
people can buy insurance that's more adequate for lower cost. In 
California, the first big buying pool was set up by the State of 
California this year, and small businesses actually got their insurance 
at a lower cost. The same thing is about to happen in Florida. So that's 
what the Government does: We require private insurance and provide the 
buying pools. Otherwise it should all be left in the private sector, 
because I agree with you, we can't run it; we shouldn't try.
    Mr. Donovan. Mr. President, you have vowed to veto any health care 
reform bill that does not include universal health care. Your plan has 
been changed somewhat. You've compromised, you've been willing to 
compromise. Are you still going to stick to that, or would you be 
willing to accept something short of universal health care?
    The President. I think if you--well, let me just quote to you back 
what the doctors and the nurses and the hospital folks said in Troy, 
North Carolina, today. We were out there with doctors that have spent 
their entire life in rural areas. They said unless you're going to cover 
everybody, you can't have health care reform. In the hospital I saw in 
Troy today, 50 percent of the people who come into the emergency room 
are people without health insurance. That cost is either going to be 
passed onto the rest of the folks in Montgomery County who have 
insurance or is going to be absorbed by the hospital in ways that 
undermine their ability to provide health care. We are the only advanced 
country in the world that doesn't do this. I just refuse to believe we 
can't figure out how to cover all of our people just like every country 
we compete with does.
    So no, that's something that I don't feel we can compromise on, 
because if we don't do that, we can't stop this explosion in cost. The 
gentleman mentioned how much Medicare and Medicaid's going up, how much 
other rates are going up. One of the ways we're going to get health care 
costs in line with inflation is to provide insurance to everybody, get 
primary and preventive care out there, and then let people buy it in a 
competitive marketplace. So you've got to cover everybody to get that 
done, so I can't compromise on that.
    Mr. Donovan. Thank you. We're going to go to our first question 
tonight from Bristol, Connecticut, Mr. President.
    The President. Bristol, Tennessee----
    Mr. Donovan. I'm sorry, Bristol, Tennessee.

[[Page 584]]

    Mr. President. ----or Virginia, depending on which side of the line 
you're standing on, right? [Laughter]

Education

[Steve Hawkins of WCYB, Bristol, TN, introduced a participant who asked 
about new education initiatives.]

    The President. Let me try to answer the question with three or four 
points. First of all, the national education goals for the year 2000 
were developed at a meeting of the Governors and the White House under 
the previous administration. I represented the Governors in that. We 
stayed up all night long, and we wrote those educational goals.
    The legislation I signed last week for the first time actually 
provides funds to school districts to promote the kind of grassroots 
reforms necessary to meet world-class standards. So we've finally done 
something on that. And also, we'll actually set up those standards in 
the law. They've never been done before. This country has never had any 
educational standards, any way of measuring whether students in Bristol, 
Tennessee, or New York City, or El Paso, Texas, were learning what they 
needed to know in a global economy.
    The second thing we're doing is passing something called school-to-
work legislation which will provide extra training opportunities for 
young people who don't want to go on to college but do need further 
training. Our evidence is that if you don't have at least 2 years of 
post-high school education or training when you get out of high school, 
you don't have a very good chance of getting a job with a growing 
income.
    The third thing that we're trying to do is to change the 
unemployment system into a reemployment system so that people can 
continuously get education throughout their lifetimes.
    And fourthly, there is in the crime bill, as well as in this 
education bill I just signed, a safe schools program which will provide 
more funds and other help to schools to try to make our children safe in 
their schools. There are an awful lot of schools in this country today 
where people aren't safe going to and from schools or aren't even safe 
in the schools. And if they're not safe there, learning can't occur. One 
of the goals that I worked real hard for back in 1989 to get adopted is 
that every school ought to be safe, disciplined, and drug free. And so 
we have a program here that will enable the schools to do that and will 
give our troubled schools, our most troubled schools, extra help to have 
the kind of security they need and the kind of learning environment they 
need and the kind of alternative dispute mechanisms our kids need to 
learn so that they can avoid violence.
    So all these things are on the education calendar this year. This 
should be the most important year for education reform in 30 years if 
all these bills pass, and I think they will.

Community Policing

[Mr. Donovan called on Sally Holiday of KXAN-TV, Austin, TX, to 
introduce the Austin police chief, who advocated community policing but 
asked about ensuring that funding would be directed to communities which 
understood how to implement the concept.]

    The President. Let me try to explain a little behind what the 
chief's question is. What she is saying is that community policing works 
if it's properly implemented. That means it's not just enough to let a 
city hire more police officers. The police officers have to be properly 
trained, properly deployed, and connected to the community so that they 
not only catch criminals, they actually work with people to prevent 
crime from occurring in the first place. We know this can happen in 
Texas--she's in Austin--and in the city of Houston, where they went to a 
more aggressive community policing situation, in 15 months the crime 
rate dropped 22 percent. And the mayor got reelected with 91 percent of 
the vote, and the two things were connected, believe me.
    You can do something to bring the crime rate down. The answer to 
your question is--at least if I prevail, the bill has not come out in 
its final form yet--we will give some of this money out based on the 
size of the problem in cities. But some of the money will have to go 
to--the money will be tied to a commitment to genuine community policing 
strategies that work. In other words, if you give more money to a city 
and they hire all the police to sit behind desks, the crime rate will 
not go down. That's basically what she's saying. You've got to know that 
this money is going to be properly spent. To the extent that we can do 
it, we are going to have standards to make sure that the money will go--
we want to give it to all major cities that need it, but we want them to 
agree

[[Page 585]]

to implement strategies that work in order to get the money. And I thank 
you for what you're doing.

Health Care Reform

[Mr. Donovan called on Callie King of WSLS-TV, Roanoke, VA. She 
introduced a health insurance agent from Rural Retreat, VA, who asked 
how health care reform would affect his business serving primarily self-
employed and small business owners.]

    The President. Well, they would still be able to buy their insurance 
from you because we don't propose to abolish private health insurance. 
What we want to do is to require people who do not have any insurance to 
buy insurance, with employers paying a portion of the premium and 
employees paying a portion of the premium. We want to make it possible 
for you to offer health insurance to small business people and self-
employed people at either lower rates or more comprehensive health care 
services for the rates that you've having to charge now, which is 
something, as you know, insurance companies can't do economically now if 
they're insuring people in small pools. So what we've proposed is some 
insurance reform that will change the nature of the economics of the 
health insurance industry, but leave it intact.
    And let me just basically say what we propose to do. From the point 
of view of the people buying the health insurance, we want to make it 
possible for small business people and self-employed people to buy 
insurance at lower rates without inflation at 35 percent a year, which 
is what it's been averaging nationwide. We want to make it illegal for 
people to have higher rates because somebody in their family has been 
sick or because they're older. We want to make cutting people off 
illegal because somebody in their family has been sick. But we don't 
want to bankrupt insurance companies, so we propose to have people 
insured in larger pools, which will mean that smaller insurance 
companies will have to pool together to insure people in larger pools. 
But that way, it will be economical for the insurance industry to insure 
people, and the people will be free of these terrible problems.
    Right now in America, 81 million Americans out of 255 million, 81 
million, are in families where there is a so-called preexisting 
condition, where somebody in that family has been sick, which means 
either they're paying higher insurance costs, they can't get insurance 
at all, or they can't change the job they're in, because if they do, 
they can't get insurance in the next job.
    These things are not this insurance agent's fault, this gentleman 
who has asked me this question. He can't help that; that's the way the 
market's organized. So what we have to do is to put people in bigger 
insurance pools and protect them from those kinds of abuses. But if 
they're in bigger pools, then the insurance companies, in essence, will 
be able to still provide those services, and they'll still be able to 
make a decent profit.
    It will change. Your business will change, but you can still be in 
business, because I don't propose to take insurance out of this but to 
change the way it works so that everybody can be insured at an 
affordable price.

[Mr. Donovan called on Ms. Hindrew to introduce a participant in 
Charlotte.]

School Prayer and Community Values

    Q. Good evening, Mr. President. Initially, I wanted to ask you a 
question about tobacco products, but I also realize that North Carolina 
is considered also as the Bible Belt, and I want to ask, since the 
Supreme Court ruling took prayer out of schools, the divorce rate, drug 
abuse, and violence has at least doubled. The following year, President 
Kennedy was killed. What other answer, as a nation who claims ``In God 
we trust,'' do we have against these problems?
    The President. Well, I don't think you can make a very--with all 
respect, I think the Supreme Court decision has been carried to the 
extent that I don't agree with. I agree with the original Supreme Court 
decision. Let me tell you what the original Supreme Court decision said, 
and most Southern Baptists, which I am, agreed with it. The original 
Supreme Court decision said that the State of New York legislature could 
not write a prayer which then had to get delivered in every schoolroom 
in the State of New York every day; in other words, that the Government 
couldn't write a prayer which then everybody who worked for every school 
system was obligated to read in every school every day. That's all it 
said. That's what it said.
    Now, it's been carried to such an extent now where they say, some 
people have said you can't have a prayer at a graduation exercise. I 
person-


[[Page 586]]

ally didn't agree with that. Why? Because if you're praying at a 
graduation exercise or a sporting event, it's a big open air thing, and 
no one's being coerced. I'm just telling you what my personal opinion 
is. I can't rewrite the Supreme Court decisions.
    But I agree that the Government should not be in the business of 
requiring people to pray or telling them what prayers to pray. I do not 
agree that people should not be able to freely pray and to acknowledge 
God. We have a chaplain in the Congress, in the Senate and the House. So 
one of the most difficult decisions we've always had to face as a people 
is how we can have the freedom of religion without pretending that 
people have to be free from religion.
    The Congress has tried to come to grips with this in two or three 
different ways and is trying to make it clear, for example, that school 
facilities could be made available for religious activities on an equal 
basis or that people could have periods of silent prayer where they're 
free to pray their own prayers.
    I think what you're saying has some merit in the sense that 
Government programs can never supplant the role that has to be played by 
the family, by the church, by community institutions, by people that 
communicate values to children one-on-one. So I think what we have to do 
is to try to find ways, continually to find ways in which a society can 
communicate the values that hold people together.
    And let me just say one thing, I think, that I've been advocating 
for nearly a decade now. I think that there ought to be a set of civic 
values that everybody can agree with that ought to be taught in our 
schools: good citizenship, respect for others, don't solve your problems 
violently, don't cheat and lie and steal, you know?--basic things that 
ought to be taught clearly and explicitly in the schools, plus, having 
periods where people can do quietly whatever they want to do. In other 
words, I think we can work this out in ways that recognize that you just 
can't have a value-free society. You can't do it. You can't hold people 
together unless we all agree on certain rules that make it possible to 
raise children and for us to live in peace together.

Tobacco Tax

    Ms. Hindrew. Mr. President, I'll go back to this gentleman's 
original question, which did have to do with tobacco. This is obviously 
a large tobacco-growing area. Your administration wants to ban tobaccos 
or smoking in the workplace, and also you have proposed raising taxes on 
tobacco. What do you say to farmers in this area who say you're trying 
to put them out of business?
    The President. Well, first of all, we do not propose banning 
smoking. The proposed regulation is based on a lot of evidence that 
people exposed to smoke can also contract cancer and other health 
problems. So what we propose to do is to say that if smoking is going to 
be allowed in the workplace, it has to be in separate rooms that are 
separately ventilated, that are properly ventilated, to protect 
nonsmokers from the benefits of secondary smoke. That's what we propose. 
And I think that's the right regulation.
    On the tobacco tax, basically I attempted to put this whole health 
care program together without any new taxes. But we have to be able to 
pay for whatever we do. We don't want to run the Government deficit up. 
The proposal is that the Government will pay for the unemployed, that 
is, public funds will pay for the unemployed, and insurance will pay for 
the employed. In order to do that, we have to have some revenues. I 
propose that it come from two sources: one, from big companies that will 
get the biggest windfall from our changes, and two, from the tobacco 
tax, because tobacco's the only thing that, based on the health studies 
we know, there is no reasonable amount you can use it without getting 
hurt. So I thought it was a fair tax.
    I know a lot of wonderful people grow tobacco, and it's been good to 
a lot of farmers. And believe me, the people that represent you in the 
Congress are not going to let anything be done without some effort to 
make sure--that the economic implications are considered on the people 
of North Carolina. But I still think it is a fair and reasonable way to 
deal with the terrible health care problem.

[At this point, the television stations took a commercial break. Mr. 
Donovan then called on another participant from Charlotte.]

NCAA Basketball Champions

    Q. Mr. President, how about them Razorbacks?

[[Page 587]]

    The President. I was very proud of them. But it was a great game, 
too. I almost had a heart attack. I thought you all would have to visit 
me in the hospital tonight if we had lost that game. [Laughter]

Whitewater

    Q. On a more serious note, Mr. President, with recent news reports 
about the First Lady's cattle futures earnings and with all these 
Whitewater allegations, many of us Americans are having a hard time with 
your credibility. How can you earn back our trust?
    The President. First of all, I've not been accused of doing anything 
wrong. I'm still waiting for the first credible source to come up and 
say what it is I did wrong. Consider this, has any other previous 
President ever had to say, ``Here's what we did 16, 17 years ago''? We 
lost money on one thing, so they attacked us on that. Then we made money 
on something, they attacked us on that. We paid our taxes. You now have 
all my tax bills, going back to 1977. I agreed to have a Special Counsel 
look into this just so I could have your trust back but, more 
important--because the press said that's what they wanted--so we could 
go back to work.
    So the Watergate Special Counsel, Sam Dash--the man who handled 
Watergate--said, ``Bill Clinton's not like previous administrations; 
they haven't stonewalled, they've given up all the information. Every 
time there's a subpoena they quickly comply.'' I've claimed no executive 
privilege; I've looked for no procedural ways to get around this. I say, 
you tell me what you want to know, I'll give you the information. I have 
done everything I could to be open and above board. They asked my wife 
about the commodities trading; she showed the reporter who asked about 
it all the trading documents we had all these years. She'd saved all 
those records; she showed them as soon as they asked about them.
    So no one has accused us of doing anything illegal. We were attacked 
for losing money; we've been attacked for making money. And it was the 
only money we ever lost or made to amount to anything on investments. 
And it happened 15 years ago, and we've given all the information to 
this Special Counsel. If we did anything wrong, he'll find it out. All 
I've asked to do is let the poor man do his work--I've given him all the 
information--and let me be President in 1994, while somebody else 
worries about what happened in 1979. That's what I've asked.
    Mr. Donovan. Mr. President, if I may follow----
    The President. Let me just say this, I was elected Governor of my 
State five times. No one ever, even my roughest enemies, my strongest 
opponents, never suggested that there was a hint of scandal in my 
administration, that anything--and no one has accused me of abuse of 
power in this job, and no one will either. You will not be ashamed of 
what I do as President. And I tell you, what we need is a little 
perspective here. I said, ``Okay, let's have this Special Counsel, and I 
will shovel him all the information I have.'' I'll answer all the 
questions they want to know. But I need to go about being President, 
worrying about the problems of the American people in 1994.
    Q. Mr. President, are you one of us middle class people, or are you 
in with the villainous money-grubbing Republicans? [Laughter] I mean, 
that's where my question came from. I'm sorry.
    The President, Well, let me say this. I grew up--I don't think that 
all Republicans are villainous. Sometimes I wonder in Washington, but I 
don't really think that. I believe that it is perfectly legitimate for 
people to invest money and risk it and make it or lose it; that's the 
free-enterprise system. What I did criticize about the 1980's, and I 
believe I was right, is that there was too much making money by pushing 
paper around in ways that cost people jobs and didn't increase the 
strength of the American economy, where you had people running 
companies, for example, taking pay raises 4 times as great as their 
workers got, 3 times as great as their profits went up, throwing people 
out of work, taking their health insurance away, and taking the money 
and running. That's what I didn't like.
    But I think we have a stock market, we have a commodities market, we 
have a real estate system in America, and people have to invest their 
money and risk it. And if you invest money, sometimes you're going to 
make it, and sometimes you're going to lose it, whether you're a 
Democrat or a Republican or an independent. I think that's good. What 
you don't want is an abuse of the system in ways that hurt the public 
interest. And I think that's what we have to guard against. And I'm 
trying to

[[Page 588]]

give us an economy where people will want to invest more money, want to 
put more money at risk in ways that create more jobs for middle class 
people.
    I grew up in what you would charitably call a middle class family, 
at least by Arkansas standards; I don't know what that means in other 
places. And I had a good education. A guy said to me today, he said, ``I 
like you. You were born without much, you got a good education, and you 
overmarried; you're kind of like me.'' [Laughter] That's what a guy said 
to me in Troy today, so that's about the way I feel.
    Thank you.

Hillary Clinton's Investments

    Mr. Donovan. Mr. President, if I may follow up on that, aside from 
the profit and loss, you pledged with your administration an 
administration that would work hard and play by the rules. There are 
analysts, however, that feel in terms of Mrs. Clinton's investment in 
the commodities, that that investment was not handled by the rules. In 
fact, it appears to them it was given preferential treatment to protect 
her from any potential loss.
    The President. That's just not true.
    Mr. Donovan. What can you tell us tonight that would prove them 
wrong?
    The President. They must have never gotten a margin call in the 
commodities market; because she did, and she was about to have a baby, 
and she got out of it. I mean, all I can tell you is she had plenty of 
money at risk, and she could have lost it. And she actually did lose 
some money as well as making money.
    She gave all the records to the people who asked for it, and they 
reviewed it. And it's just not true. It's not true that she didn't. She 
got advice to go in it from a friend of ours who was quoted extensively 
in the New York Times. They got into a very good market, and they made 
some money. A lot of the people who got into it at the same time in our 
area stayed in it too long and lost some money. She got cold feet and 
got out, and that's the only reason she didn't lose the money that she 
made. And I think that's the kind of thing that happens in the market 
every day. It's just not true. The records are there. You can look at 
the records. And she paid taxes on everything she made. And it's not 
true that she didn't have anything at risk.
    Some of these same people also asserted for weeks and weeks and 
weeks that I didn't lose any money in the Whitewater thing. Now, the man 
that was head of the IRS for years has reviewed all the records, and he 
said we plainly lost money; we plainly paid the taxes we owed. You look 
at the taxes we paid, the percentage of our income we paid in taxes. I'm 
like most of you, I gave my records every year to an accountant, and I 
told them to resolve it out in favor of the Government. I never wanted 
anybody questioning whether I had paid the taxes that I owed, because I 
wasn't in my line of work for the money. I wanted to pay what I owed. 
And I have paid a significant percentage of my income in taxes every 
year, as I should have. And I have never tried to avoid paying what I 
owed.
    So it's just not true that she did anything wrong or that I did 
anything wrong. And if we did, that's what we've got a Special Counsel 
for. And we've given him all the information. And everybody that's 
reviewed it said we haven't behaved like previous Presidents, we haven't 
stonewalled, we haven't backed up, haven't done anything. We've just 
given him the information. Everybody that's looked at this has said 
we've been very open with this Special Counsel. So let him do his job 
and let me be President. That's what I think we ought to do.

Forest Management Plan

[The president of the Roanoke Regional Homebuilders Association asked 
how the Pacific Northwest forest plan would balance environmental 
concerns against the rising cost of lumber.]

    The President. Well, first, one of the reasons that the cost of 
lumber has gone up so much is that we had an explosion in building, 
because interest rates went down so low, the lowest we've had in over 20 
years. And we drove them down real low last year with the deficit 
reduction plan. And there was a big spurt in building, so there was a 
shortage in lumber, so the price of lumber went up. That's always going 
to happen.
    It is true that we've had to cut way back on clearing timber in the 
so-called old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest because there 
wasn't nearly as much timber up there as we had thought, and it takes 
forever and a day

[[Page 589]]

to grow those tress, something like 200 years a tree.
    So what we've tried to do, sir, I guess, will both help and hurt the 
situation. We have adopted a ceiling for timber cutting that is lower 
than the ceilings of the past. That will hurt, from your point of view. 
What will help is, we have moved aggressively to actually start cutting 
those trees again. It's been years, as you know, it's been years since 
any trees at all have been cut up there because it's all been tied up in 
environmental lawsuits in Federal court.
    So what we're doing, we just got permission to start cutting trees, 
and we're trying to move so that we can cut the trees we can without 
losing the old growth forests. Only 10 percent of the old growth forests 
of the Pacific Northwest is still up there. And I don't think that in 
good conscience and legally we can allow it all to be destroyed. But we 
can clear more timber now if we can just keep pushing ahead and get 
these things out of the courts and back on the land where they belong.

Bosnia and North Korea

[Ms. Hindrew introduced a participant in Charlotte who asked why North 
Korea should take U.S. threats to seize nuclear sites seriously, in view 
of the recent downsizing of the military and the perception of waffling 
on using military force in the former Yugoslavia.]

    The President. First of all, I have to correct your premise. I was 
very clear all during the campaign of 1992 that I did not think we 
should send our ground forces in to get in the middle of a civil war in 
Yugoslavia but that I would support using American forces as part of a 
NATO force if there could be a peace agreement and that I would make our 
air power available to support the United Nations mission there.
    The United States took the lead in getting NATO to agree to do that 
last August, and as you know, the United States and NATO flights shot 
some planes down in Yugoslavia recently. And nearly everybody I know, 
sir, believes that it was the leadership, the aggressive leadership of 
the United States, which led to the cease-fire around Sarajevo, which 
helped to get the agreement between the Bosnian Muslims and the 
Croatians and which has made the progress that we've made. So I don't 
believe that we have been vacillating at all. There were some planes 
that were shot down in the former Yugoslavia as the result of the 
strength that we showed there, as we did in Iraq. When I received 
concrete evidence that there was an assassination attempt on former 
President Bush, we took military action there.
    Now, the question is: What should we do with North Korea? This is a 
very serious thing. North Korea has said they want a nonnuclear Korean 
Peninsula. North Korea has said they want to get along with South Korea. 
It is the most isolated regime in the world today. Nobody wants them to 
develop nuclear weapons, not China, their old ally. China doesn't want 
them to become a nuclear power. Japan doesn't want them to become a 
nuclear power because they don't want to have to think about developing 
nuclear weapons. South Korea certainly doesn't. Seoul, South Korea, by 
far the biggest city in South Korea, is very close to the North Korean 
border.
    The question, sir, is: What is the proper way to try to get North 
Korea to comply? And what we have done is to try to work very closely 
first with the South Koreans--whatever we do, we have to do in 
partnership with them--and with the Japanese and the Chinese, pushing 
firmly, firmly, firmly, to get the inspections. We got more inspections. 
They didn't do everything they promised to do, and so now we've got the 
United Nations to make a very strong statement that they have to do it. 
If they don't do it, we'll continue to go forward.
    But this is a very delicate thing. It's easy to talk about and 
difficult to do. North Korea and South Korea are right there together; 
their armies are facing each other. Seoul is a very big city on the 
border of North Korea. And we've got to work closely with the South 
Koreans and the others, and we're going to be very, very firm about it. 
But if I say we're going to do something, we're going to do it. I'm not 
going to threaten something that we're not prepared to do. I think what 
we should do is say less and do more in international politics.
    Ms. Hindrew. Mr. President, several months ago, in November of last 
year, you said we will not allow North Korea to build a nuclear weapon. 
We now believe that there are at least two nuclear weapons and possibly 
a third. When you say we will not allow them to build it, what are you 
willing to do to stop them? And what are you willing to do now that we 
believe they have them?

[[Page 590]]

    The President. Well, the intelligence community believes now 
something they did not believe at that time, which is that they may have 
a rudimentary nuclear weapon which may or may not even be deliverable, 
but which may be a bomb in a literal sense. That may or may not have 
happened. You've seen that in the press.
    We have to see what our options are. One of the things we can do is 
to continue to put economic pressure on North Korea. But if we do it 
through the United Nations, we have to carry along with us the South 
Koreans. After all, the South Koreans have the biggest stake. We have 
the next biggest stake because we have 40,000 soldiers in Korea. The 
next biggest stake is in the Japanese who are right there handy. And we 
have a lot of options short of the military option to continue to make 
it a very painful decision for the North Koreans to do. So we have not 
ruled out any of our options, and we will continue to press.
    Ms. Hindrew. Specifically, what are those options? Economic 
sanctions don't seem to----
    The President. Well, there's all kinds of economic--well, no, we 
haven't imposed economic sanctions yet.
    Ms. Hindrew. No, we haven't imposed economic sanctions, but most 
analysts say that economic sanctions won't help.
    The President. They may or may not. They may or may not. Economic 
sanctions have done a lot of damage in the places where they've been 
imposed. They just don't have immediate results.
    Ms. Hindrew. Except North Korea is a different situation. It's 
incredibly isolated; it's very self-sufficient.
    The President. It's not very--actually, it depends on how you define 
self-sufficiency. It's not doing--they're not doing very well.
    Ms. Hindrew. No, they're not doing well, but they're still self-
sufficient and they're not doing well.
    The President. Well, that's right. So if they do even worse, then 
they'll have to pay a price for their irresponsible conduct. The thing I 
said to the North Koreans through formal and informal channels is, what 
are they getting for this? They get nothing for this. They literally are 
getting nothing. All they're doing is becoming more and more isolated. 
They're making themselves poorer. They're making themselves more 
alienated. Even the Chinese don't agree with what they're doing.
    China now is doing 10 times as much business with South Korea as 
North Korea. So what we have to do is to try to find a way to reach 
them, get them to come to their senses, keep the commitments they've 
made. But it's very easy to talk tough here. You have to think about 
what the consequences are. I am determined to keep putting the pressure 
on, but I do not believe it serves any useful purpose to inflame the 
situation with rhetoric. That's what the North Koreans have done; it's a 
big mistake. We are sending Patriot missiles there. We can resume our 
military exercises there. We can impose stiffer economic sanctions. We 
have a lot of options there that we can still explore.

Interest Rates

[Mr. Donovan called on a participant in Austin, TX, who asked if the 
administration would take responsibility for higher interest rates.]

    The President.  Why do you think they went up?
    Q. Well, I'm asking you.
    The President. I'm asking you. You asked me to take responsibility, 
so I ask you why. They plainly went down after we declared our deficit 
reduction package. That's why they went down. They have gone up, I 
think, for two reasons, maybe three.
    One is we had 7 percent economic growth in the last quarter of last 
year. That's the most economic growth we have had in 10 years. Second--
we had 458,000 new jobs come into this economy in the month of March 
alone. That's the most new jobs we've had in any given month in over 6 
years. When you have that kind of growth, some people are going to think 
that inflation is coming back in the economy, and interest rates will go 
up.
    Secondly, I think there was an overreaction to what the Federal 
Reserve did. The Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates in the 
hope that they would send a signal that they were going to fight 
inflation and that long-term rates would stabilize. Instead of that, the 
market overreacted to it.
    The third thing that happened is most everybody in America thought 
the stock market was somewhat overvalued. When people pull their money 
out of the stock market, if they put their money into other securities, 
that will tend to raise long-term rates.

[[Page 591]]

    I think those are the reasons they've gone up. The issue is, are we 
going to continue to have economic growth or not? I think we are. And if 
you ask me to take responsibility because interest rates went up where 
we had 7 percent growth in the last 3 months of last year and 458,000 
new jobs in March, I'll be glad to take responsibility for that if 
that's what you want. That's what I call a high class problem.
    I do think that the markets are overreacting to what the Federal 
Reserve did. And I hope that they'll settle down. I hope the stock 
market will settle down; I hope the interest rates will go back down. 
But we still did the right thing, sir, to keep trying to bring the 
deficit down. And I still think we've got to pass this budget that will 
eliminate 115 programs, cut 200 and something others, and give us 3 
years of deficit reduction for the first time since Harry Truman. I 
think we ought to do that. I think it's good economics.

Anticrime Efforts

[Ms. Hindrew introduced an 11-year-old girl in Charlotte, who asked what 
could be done to stop the growing crime rate.]

    The President. I think we have to do a lot of things. I think, first 
of all, really serious criminals who continue to repeat their crimes 
endangering people should be put away for longer periods--that young 
girl, Polly Klaas, who was kidnapped and killed, about your age, by a 
person who had done something like that before. A relatively small 
number of the criminals in this country are repeat offenders and truly 
dangerous. Those people can be identified with some accuracy, and they 
ought to be subject to our ``three strikes and you're out'' law. The 
second thing I think we need to do is to have what the police chief in 
Austin said, we have to have police that are on the street working with 
folks like you, making it safe for people to go to school, safe for 
children to be in school, and reducing the crime rate. The third thing 
we ought to do is to begin to take these dangerous weapons out of the 
hands of these young gang members and other people who do not have them 
for sporting or hunting purposes. And the fourth thing we need to do is 
to begin to teach young people, when they're your age and younger, 
nonviolent ways of dealing with their frustration and their anger and 
their differences. You've got kids just up and shooting each other 
today. The mayor of Baltimore told me a heart-wrenching story about an 
18-year-old young man on Halloween day last October who was taking two 
little kids down the street and was shot dead by a 13-year-old who was 
just dared to do it by another teenager. These kids have got to be 
reached. We've got to reach these kids so they don't do that, before 
they become terrible problems. That's what I think we have to do.

The Economy

[Mr. Hawkins introduced a participant in Bristol, TN, who expressed 
concern about Social Security and the impact of the deficit.

    The President. Let me say first, with regard to Social Security, 
right now the Social Security tax brings in more money than is necessary 
to pay out in Social Security every year. And Social Security should be 
stable for quite a long while now. I don't think you have to worry about 
that.
    Secondly, does the deficit matter? Yes, it does. It matters when we 
have to take 15 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes to pay in 
interest on the debt. That's money we can't spend on education or health 
care or jobs or something else. And it can weaken our economy, because 
we have to borrow money sometimes from overseas.
    Now, if we keep going, right now, the real way to look at the 
deficit is, what is the percentage of our deficit as a percentage of our 
national income? If you look at it that way and compare it to all the 
other major economies of the world, our deficit now, we've gotten it low 
enough so that it's smaller as a percentage of our national income than 
any of the countries we compete with, major economies, except one, 
except Japan. And if we keep going, we'll get it down below that. We 
have to keep driving it down.
    The only way to get it to zero is to go back to the very first 
question I was asked. The only way to get it to zero, because we're 
cutting defense all we can, and that gentleman made--I don't think we 
can cut it any more. And I'm very concerned. I don't want the Congress 
to cut defense any more than is in our plan in this budget session. 
We're cutting defense already. We're cutting domestic spending that's 
discretionary for the first time since 1969. The only thing that's going 
up in this budget is that health care costs are still going up at 2 and

[[Page 592]]

3 times the rate of inflation. So the only way we can get the deficit 
down to zero now is to bring health care costs in line with inflation. 
And that's what I'm trying hard to do. And I hope we can do that.
    But as long as the deficit is going down instead of up, which it is 
now, it will be a smaller and smaller percentage of our income, and our 
economy will be stronger. And I think you can be confident that we're 
going in the right direction. And that's the important thing. We're 
going in the right direction, not the wrong direction.

President's Travel Costs

[A participant in Charlotte asked what it cost the taxpayers for the 
President to attend the NCAA basketball championship games.]

    The President. I really--I don't know. But one of the reasons I 
scheduled this and I put this health care thing together here was 
because we had already planned for me to be out all week long doing 
this. And I had not been to North Carolina to do an event like this. So 
we decided that it would add no extra, except whatever it cost to 
prepare me to go in and out of that arena. And that's mostly because of 
the security.
    But I would say to you what you have to decide is whether you think 
the President should either give up the Secret Service or should, for 
example, never throw out the first ball on opening day of baseball 
season. Because one of the things that's happened, particularly since 
President Reagan was shot back in 1981, is that the security surrounding 
the President--and especially since the violence has gone up in our 
country--has increased greatly. And it does, it costs too much money, 
and it's too disruptive to take the President around. I mean, to me it's 
really a troubling thing coming as I do from kind of ordinary 
surroundings in a little State where my lifestyle was very informal.
    But I think what the American people have to decide is whether they 
want the President to stay home in the White House all the time. If you 
want the President to go out and be either a normal citizen contacting 
other citizens or do things the President normally does, like throwing 
out the first ball in baseball season, then you have to be willing to 
say that that's an ordinary part of the cost of being President.
    Now, when I do go out for political events, for example, if I go 
speak to a fundraiser for somebody, they have to pay the cost of my 
going there. So if I do something political, that's--or any President, 
the same was true for President Bush and President Reagan--then you 
don't bear that cost; that is covered. But if we do something that is 
not political, you do bear the cost, even if it's what you might call--
what you said, frivolous. I mean, if I go on vacation, the Secret 
Service goes with me; so that I pay for the cost of my personal expense 
on vacation, but you pay the cost of all the Presidential apparatus 
being there. That's something that has always been true and is now more 
costly, especially since the attempt on President Reagan's life.
    Mr. Donovan. Thank you, Mr. President. We----
    The President. I don't blame you. I didn't think it's disrespectful. 
It bothers me, too.
    Mr. Donovan. We'll let you relax for a few moments. We'll take a 
break and come back with more questions for President Clinton.

Health Care Reform

[Following a commercial break, a participant in Charlotte discussed the 
problems of temporary workers and asked how health care reform would 
apply to them.]

    The President. Thank you. First of all, I think a lot of you 
probably know this, but one of the reasons for the explosion of 
temporary workers in America may be that the employers don't have to pay 
for the benefits. So that's one of the things that happened.
    Under our plan, here's how it would work. If a temporary worker 
worked 10 hours a week or more, the employer would have to pay a portion 
of the health insurance premium for the employee and the employee would 
have to pay a portion, and then we'd have a pool, a Government-funded 
pool, that would pay the rest. Because it isn't fair to make the 
employer pay the whole thing, for example, if the temporary worker's 
only working 20 hours a week, or 15 or 10; they would pay a portion. 
Then if it was 30 or more, the employer would just have to cover the 
temporary worker as long as the worker worked for the employer as if the 
employee were a regular employee. So you would be covered as a temporary 
worker always. And I think that's very important.
    Let me just make one related point. I have spent a lot of the last 
12 years of my life trying

[[Page 593]]

to figure out how to help people who are on welfare get off of welfare 
and go to work. We just made a big change in the tax laws in America, 
cutting income taxes for almost 17 percent of the American people who 
work for very modest wages and are just above poverty line because we 
want to make sure that people always have an incentive to work.
    The next big problem is making sure people have health care. A 
center here, right here in Charlotte, North Carolina, just reported in 
the last couple of days that having interviewed welfare recipients in 
Tennessee and North Carolina, 83 percent of them said they would take a 
minimum wage job and leave welfare if they had health coverage for their 
children. So I'm just supporting what this gentleman's saying. That's 
why it's very important. Our plan would cover that for you.

[Ms. King introduced a small business owner who asked if the Government 
would subsidize his firm's projected insurance cost of $184,000 a year 
under the new plan.]

    The President. Well, first of all, is 8 percent of payroll--is that 
what 8 percent of payroll is for you?
    Q. Question? What was that?
    The President. Would 8 percent of payroll be $180,000?
    Q. Eighty percent--eighty percent is your proposal, sir.
    The President. I know. But there is a ceiling; even for the most 
prosperous businesses, no one can pay more than 7.9 percent of payroll. 
For small businesses that are eligible for a discount, it can go down as 
low as 3.5 percent of payroll. That's the maximum in a sliding scale in 
there.
    Let me ask you a question. We don't want to take everybody else's 
time on this. I would appreciate it if you would actually write to me 
personally and send me this information. The short answer to your 
question is, no employer can pay more than 7.9 percent of payroll under 
our plan. Today, on average, American employers pay between 8 and 9.5 
percent of payroll for health care. Small businesses with low average 
wages are eligible for discounts that will take the payroll costs down 
as far as 3.5 percent of payroll. I would not favor a small business 
mandate unless we can provide a discount to small businesses because 
there are too many that can't afford it.
    I will say this, though, since you talk about the car dealership. I 
grew up in the car business, and I had a car dealer from Arkansas and 
his family staying with me the other night. And he pointed out he 
provided health insurance for 20 years, as you have, and his is right at 
8 percent a payroll. And he said none of his competitors had done it, 
but he'd put three competitors out of business even though he had to pay 
it because he never lost any employees. So it's hard for me to believe 
that your payroll costs would be that great with only 70 employees, and 
that's why I'd like to ask you to write.
    There's a ceiling of 7.9 percent for all businesses. Small 
businesses, depending on their size and their wage, are eligible for 
discounts that could go down to a low of 3.5 percent. That's how it 
would work.

Immigration

[Ms. Hindrew introduced a student who asked if the Federal Government 
could take steps to educate and train Hispanic immigrants so that States 
would not feel forced to take drastic anti-immigration measures.]

    The President. I do think we should do more on education and 
training. But I also have to tell you, I think we should do more to keep 
people who are not legal immigrants out of the country if we can.
    Now, we're a democracy with a vast border, so our ability to keep 
all illegal immigrants out is somewhat limited. But we have laws in this 
country that I think ought to be--I have encouraged immigration. I 
believe in immigration, but I think people should come here legally. And 
you know, there are people that have been waiting years to get in this 
country and who won't violate the laws. And people who come against the 
law get around that and get ahead of the ones that have been waiting 
years to come in. I don't think that's fair. So we're trying to stiffen 
the borders.
    Now, when people are here, I think more of them should go to 
college. And I think more American citizens should be able to go to 
college. What we've done there is to try to lower the interest rates on 
college loans, stretch out the repayments, and permit more young people 
to earn money against college by doing community service. Those are the 
three things we're doing to try to get more education and training for 
kids that otherwise couldn't afford it who

[[Page 594]]

are legally in this country, whether they're citizens or legal 
immigrants.

College Costs and Job Creation

[Ms. Holiday introduced the student body president at the University of 
Texas in Austin, who asked about the Government's role in helping 
students pay their bills both before and after graduation.]

    The President. Well, first, let's talk about how you pay your bills 
when you're in school. My goal was when I became President to make sure 
that money was never a reason young people did not go to college. We 
know that the unemployment rate in America for high school dropouts is 
11.5 percent. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 3.5 
percent; with all the job problems, it's much lower.
    So we are redoing the student loans so that the interest rates are 
lower and the repayment terms are better and you can get the money you 
need while you go to college. There also, year after next, will be 
100,000 positions in America in community service so people can earn 
credit against their college--you can get the money to go to college 
while working in their communities. Now, when you get out, if you can 
get a job, and I'll come back to that in a minute, under our plan, you 
can pay these college loans off as a percentage of your income no matter 
how much money you borrow.
    So the last thing I have to do is try to create more jobs. And I'll 
go back to what I said opening the program. In the last 14 months, our 
economy has produced 2.3 million new jobs. In the previous 4 years, the 
economy produced only a million new jobs in the private sector. So we're 
trying to make 8 million in this 4-year period, as opposed to about a 
million in the last 4-year period. If we make it, there will be more 
jobs for young people. That's what we have to do. And so far we're on 
track. We're on track to make that 8 million. And we've got to keep 
doing it. That's all I can tell you. There's nothing else I can do 
except to keep trying to create more jobs and help the private sector to 
create more jobs.

Teen Pregnancy

[A participant asked about increasing the amount of sex education given 
in schools to deal with the increase in teen pregnancy.]

    The President. I think we should. It is largely a decision to be 
made at the local school district level. But I have worked on this 
problem for a long time; when I was a Governor I worked on it. And I can 
tell you what I've seen from my own experience works--what I believe 
works.
    I believe if you have programs in the schools which are supported by 
community leaders, including religious leaders, which do two things: 
number one, tell young people that the only completely safe way to avoid 
teen pregnancy is to abstain from sex but that also, here is how your 
body works, here's what causes this, here's how families are built, 
here's how it all works, and here's what you should do to protect 
yourself so that you do not get in a position where you have an 
unwanted, premature pregnancy--I think those kind of clinics work. I 
know they do; I have seen them work, if they are supported by the 
community. And I could give you example after example where it's 
happened.
    I personally believe it is a great mistake to pretend that this 
problem doesn't exist and to say that somebody else is going to handle 
it. This goes back to what this gentleman said. If we don't deal with 
this in the schools, I don't know where it will be dealt with. Now, I 
know a lot of religious leaders think that if you discuss this in 
schools, you'll be encouraging children to have sexual relations 
prematurely. I personally don't believe that because of the evidence. I 
think it's better to tell kids the truth, tell them they ought not to do 
it, tell them if they do it, here are the consequences and here's how to 
deal with it. That's what I think; I think we should be very up-front.
    But it only works--I have seen this, I have seen this issue tear 
communities apart--it only works if you bring the community people, 
including the leaders of the community of faith, in on the front end and 
honestly and frankly discuss this. I saw a community in my State where a 
Methodist minister sat on a committee that voted to give the nurse in 
the health clinic the authority to distribute condoms. I saw another 
community which voted against doing it. Both communities had a decline 
in teen pregnancy because they agreed on the values that would be 
pressed, and they tried to get these kids to save their own lives and 
their future. So I think we can push it at the national level, but there 
has to be a belief at the local level

[[Page 595]]

that your life and your generation's life is worth fighting for.

President's Record

[Mr. Hawkins introduced a participant who cited discrepancies between 
campaign rhetoric and administration actions on taxes and foreign policy 
and asked why he should believe the President regarding the Whitewater 
allegations.]

    The President. Well, first of all, let's go through each one of 
those issues. If you take the Whitewater issue, you don't have to take 
my word for anything. Look at my tax returns. When's the last President 
that went back 17 years before he became President and gave his tax 
returns up? Just look at them; don't take my word for it.
    A former Commissioner of the IRS said that all the Republican 
attacks on me saying that I owed more taxes and that I made money 
instead of lost money on Whitewater were flat wrong. I have been the 
subject, sir, of false charges. People saying things about me that are 
not true don't make my credibility an issue. They make their credibility 
an issue, not mine.
    Secondly, we have a different position on Bosnia, a different 
position on Haiti, and a different position on China. We have not solved 
the Bosnian process, but I would remind you that because of the 
leadership of this administration, we have got an agreement now with the 
Europeans that we worked with. There is a safe zone around Sarajevo; 
there's an agreement between the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatians; we 
are making progress in Bosnia. We have a significantly different policy 
in China that a lot of people disagree with, but it's clearly different 
from the policy of the previous administration. On Haiti, our policy in 
Haiti is different. Our policy on return of the Haitians is the same 
because I became convinced, after I became President, that hundreds and 
hundreds of Haitians were going to die trying to come to the shores of 
this country unless we set up a system that would allow them to apply 
for refugee status in Haiti before they came here. And we have set up a 
system that did not exist when I became President to allow the Haitians 
to apply for refugee status in Haiti before they came here. So I just 
disagree with that.
    On the middle class tax cut, let me just point out to you, sir, that 
after the election, the deficit by the previous administration was 
revised upward by more than $50 billion in the next year. I didn't do 
that; I didn't have control of those figures.
    So here's what I had to do. Do I go through with a whole middle 
class tax cut and let the deficit balloon and have interest rates higher 
and weaken this economy? Or do I tell the American people the truth, 
which is what I did: The deficit is bigger than I thought it was going 
to be, so I can't go the whole way. I'm going to give 17 percent of the 
working people in this country an income tax cut, which you never heard 
about last year. On April 15th, 1.2 percent get an income tax increase, 
17 percent almost--16.6 percent--get an income tax cut. And I still 
believe there ought to be a family tax credit for the rest of middle 
class America. But I have a 4-year term, sir, not a one-year term.
    I haven't abandoned it; I can't get everything done in one year. I'm 
doing the very best I can and, by the way, the independent analysis last 
year said that we got more done in the first year of our Presidency than 
anybody in the last 30 years. So I haven't given up on that commitment; 
I just can't get it done. I think I have done a remarkable job of doing 
what I said I would do, and I think you ought to trust me.
    Mr. Donovan. Mr. President, we're back to home base for our next 
question.
    The President. You ought to be free to disagree with me, but 
disagreeing with me is different from trust. We ought not to mix our 
apples and oranges here.

Anticrime Efforts

[Ms. Hindrew introduced a participant who asked what could be done to 
ensure that laws favor the citizen instead of the criminal.]

    The President. First, I believe as I said, that ``three strikes and 
you're out'' laws will help. You just passed one here in North Carolina, 
too. Keep in mind, most criminal law, folks, is State law carried out by 
local prosecutors and local police forces. That's why I think what I can 
do is to help change the environment: more police, deal with the assault 
weapons, give the local folks the resources they need to fight crime and 
to help kids before they get in trouble.
    I also support capital punishment, and since 1981 have been on 
record, at least since then, in trying to accelerate the appeals 
process. I think it is wrong to have appeals processes that

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take 6, 7, 8, 9 years. And there are things that can be done to 
accelerate that, which we are debating in the Congress as well now.
    But I think it's important--what you need is certainty and clarity 
of punishment. We need a clean, meaningful, credible ``three strikes and 
you're out'' law. We don't want to put the kitchen sink in there. Take 
the serious violent offenses and put them there. And then the States 
that have these laws should enforce the laws, whatever they are. That's 
what I believe.
    We had a capital punishment law in Arkansas when I was Governor, and 
I carried it out. But it is not the sole answer, believe me. What you've 
got to do, I think, is to reduce the crime rate and--you heard the 
police chief in Austin--most law enforcement people I know think that 
putting more police on the street in the proper way and connecting them 
to the community again will do more to lower crime than anything else we 
can do. But I do agree with you on the appeals, too.

Community Activism

[A participant affirmed his continued support for the President and 
asked what average Americans could do specifically on the local level to 
help him.]

    The President. Let me just give you a few, real quickly. First of 
all, you can tell your Member of Congress, whether you're a Republican 
or Democrat or whether they're Republicans or Democrats: Pass the crime 
bill, deal with the health care crisis, and don't let anything divert us 
from the major business of the country. Let's pass the budget, keep the 
deficit coming down, pass the crime bill, deal with the health care 
crisis, deal with welfare reform, act to rein in some of the excessive 
lobbying activities. In other words, do the country's business.
    Then, here in every community--believe me, I mean, I used to live in 
a community, I didn't always have this job where I, to go back to what 
the lady said, travel around with a big retinue--if you really want to 
help my agenda, what can be done in your community to help people walk 
the streets and fight crime? What can be done in your community to put 
males like you, one-on-one, in touch with these young men before they 
get in trouble or when they're on the edge of being in trouble, to help 
them rescue their lives? I met a man today who works in a program like 
this, who introduced me to a 17-year-old boy who was orphaned, living 
alone in his house at 17, but still in school, obeying the law, 
graduating from high school, looking forward to a better life. Citizens 
have got to get involved in saving these children one-on-one. The most 
important thing you could do is to figure--in my judgment, to help carry 
out my agenda--is figure out whether in your community everything has 
been done to make the streets safe, the schools safe, the kids have a 
better future, recreational opportunities for kids, the kind of things 
that make communities strong and bridge racial and income divides that 
are tearing this country apart. That's what I think we have to do. If 
you want to help my agenda, make your community strong, and America will 
work. Personal volunteer time, committing to that kind of thing, that 
will work.
    Mr. Donovan. Thank you, Mr. President. In the couple of minutes we 
have remaining, we'd like to have you, if you will, please reflect on 
what you've heard here tonight: 90 minutes' worth of questions, it's 
gone very fast, and you've answered a variety of questions. What will 
you take back to Washington with you from tonight?
    The President. A deeply rewarding sense that the American people 
love this country and that most people in this country get up every day 
and go to work and do the very best they can with their jobs and with 
their families and with their communities, and they want me and they 
want those of us who live in Washington not to become diverted from 
their business. We have some serious problems, but don't forget, folks, 
we also have some great strengths in this country.
    We've still got the strongest economy in the world. We've still got 
the most flexible economy with the greatest chance to make the changes 
we need to make to go into the 21st century as the greatest country in 
the world. And the only thing that could divert us, the only thing that 
can defeat us is ourselves. And I also think, frankly, I've been 
reassured that I think you all have a pretty realistic idea about what 
it is that I have to do and what it is that you have to do. We've all 
got jobs to do. Some things have to be done by the President and the 
Congress. Some things have to be done by the private sector and 
community leaders. Some things have to be done by the State and local 
government.

[[Page 597]]

    And I try always to think about how I can be a leader with a voice 
for all the people and still be very up front with the American people 
about what I have to do and what you all have to do. Because these are 
things we have to do together. The Government cannot solve all the 
problems of the country. But together we can solve the problems of the 
country, and together we can move ahead.
    I always come away with this--I come away here so much more 
energized and optimistic because I think people are real realistic and 
yet hopeful out here. I don't think the American people are as cynical 
as sometimes people in public life think they are. I think you all still 
believe in yourselves and your potential and your country.
    Mr. Donovan. Congress is coming back from its break. And I'll just 
ask you just in a few seconds, have you heard anything here tonight that 
will change your agenda when you go back to Washington?
    The President. No, but I'm going to tell them that near as I can 
tell, people sure want them to pass that crime bill and not fool around 
with it, do it right away. That's where we're going to start.

Note: The town meeting began at 7:35 p.m. at the WCNC-TV studios.