CLINTON: I believe we can increase investment and reduce the deficit, if we not only ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their share; we also provide $100 billion in tax relief and $140 billion of spending cuts. Take money from defense cuts and reinvest it in transportation, communications and environmental clean-up systems.
BUSH: I don't like trickle down government. Clinton says grow government. Government doesn't create jobs. If they do, they're make-work jobs. It's the private sector that creates jobs.
PEROT: We still have a significant deficit under each of their plans. There's only one way out of this, and that is to have a growing job base. My plan balances the budget within 6 years. We didn't do it faster than that because we didn't want to disrupt the economy.
BUSH: I am for the North American Free Trade Agreement. 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 recession. We need more free trade agreements.
CLINTON: I say it does more good than harm if we can get 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 reeducate and retrain American workers who lose their jobs.
BUSH: I was not for the bill that he was talking about because it was not tough enough on the criminal.
PEROT: What it really boils down to is: we have become so preoccupied with the rights of the criminal that we have forgotten the rights of the innocent. In our country, we have evolved to a point where we've put millions of innocent people in jail, because you go to the poor neighborhoods and they've put bars on their windows and bars on their doors and put themselves in jail to protect the things that they acquired legitimately. Now, that's where we are. We have got to become more concerned about people who play by the rules and get the balance we require.
PEROT: That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas, and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while, you cash in, become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month, then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers, and you can move your factory south of the border, pay $1 an hour for labor. There will be a giant sucking sound going south. So if the people send me to Washington, the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street.
CLINTON: I agree.
BUSH: Let's do it.
Q. Could we make a commitment?
BUSH: I think it depends on how you define it. In general, let's talk about issues. But in the Presidency, a lot goes into it. Caring goes into it; that's not particularly specific. Strength goes into it; that's not specific. This is what a President has to do. In principle, though, I'll take your point.
PEROT: No hedges, no ifs, ands, and buts, I'll take the pledge, because I know the American people want to talk about issues and not tabloid journalism. So I'll take the pledge, and we'll stay on the issues. Now, just for the record, I don't have any spin doctors. I don't have any speechwriters. Probably shows. I make those charts you see on television even. But you don't have to wonder if it's me talking.
CLINTON: Wait a minute. The ideas I express are mine. I'm just as sick as you are by having to wake up and figure out how to defend myself every day
BUSH: The Social Security system was fixed, about 5 years, and it's projected out to be sound beyond that. So at least we have time to work with it.
PEROT: Everybody's ducking it so I'm going to say it: we are not letting that surplus stay in the bank. We are not investing that surplus like a pension fund. We are spending that surplus to make the deficit look smaller to you than it really is. That puts you in jail in corporate America if you kept books that way, but in Government it's just the way things are. That's because it comes at you, not from you. Now then, that money needs to be--they don't even pay interest on it, they just write a note for the interest.
CLINTON: A lot of you may not know this: Social Security produces a $70 billion surplus a year. Six increases in the payroll tax--that means people with incomes of $51,000 a year or less pay a disproportionately high share of the Federal tax burden.
PEROT: It's 10 cents a year, cumulative. It finally gets to 50 cents at the end of the fifth year. I think "punish" is the wrong word. I didn't create this problem; we're trying to solve it. Some of our international competitors collect up to $3.50 a gallon in taxes. And they use that money to build infrastructure and create jobs. We collect 35 cents, and we don't have it to spend. I know it's not popular. But the people who will be helped the most by it are the working people who will get the jobs created because of this tax. Why do we have to do it? Because we have so mismanaged our country over the years, and it is now time to pay the fiddler.
BUSH: The question was on fairness. I just disagree. I don't believe it is fair to slap a 50-cent-a-gallon tax. I don't think we need to do it.
PEROT: On priorities, we've got to help Russia succeed in its revolution and all of its republics. When we think of Russia, remember we're thinking of many countries now. We've got to help them. That's pennies on the dollar compared to renewing the cold war. We've got all kinds of agreements on paper and some that are being executed on getting rid of nuclear warheads. Russia and its republics are out of control or, at best, in weak control right now. It's a very unstable situation. You've got every rich Middle Eastern country over there trying to buy nuclear weapons. We really need to nail down the intercontinental ballistic missiles, the ones that can hit us from Russia.
BUSH: You might have missed it, but I worked out a deal with Boris Yeltsin to eliminate, get rid of entirely, the most destabilizing weapons of all, the SS-18, the big intercontinental ballistic missile. That's been done, and thank God it has
BUSH: We were the first major country to stand up against the abuse in Tiananmen Square. We are the ones that worked out the prison labor deal. Gov. Clinton's philosophy is to isolate them.
PEROT: China has some very elderly leaders that will not be around too much longer. Capitalism is growing and thriving across big portions of China. We have a delicate tightwire walk that we must go through at the present time to make sure that we do not cozy up to tyrants, to make sure that they don't get the impression that they can suppress their people. But time is our friend there because their leaders will change in not too many years, worst case. And their country is making great progress.
BUSH: I think it's experience at [the presidential] level.
CLINTON: Experience counts, but it's not everything. Values, judgment, and my record should count for something. We need a new approach. The same old experience is not relevant.
PEROT: Well, they've got a point. I don't have any experience in running up a $4 trillion debt. I don't have any experience in gridlocked Government where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everybody blames everybody else. But I do have a lot of experience in getting things done. So if we want to stop talking about it and do it, I've got a lot of experience in figuring out how to solve problems, making the solutions work, and then moving on to the next one. I've got a lot of experience in not taking 10 years to solve a 10-minute problem. So if it's time for action, I think I have experience that counts. If it's more time for gridlock and talk and finger-pointing, I'm the wrong man.
BUSH: I think it is important that the US stay in Europe and continue to guarantee the peace. We simply cannot pull back.
PEROT: If I'm poor and you're rich and I can get you to defend me, that's good. But when the tables get turned, I ought to do my share. Right now we spend about $300 billion a year on defense. The Japanese spend around $30 billion in Asia. The Germans spend around $30 billion in Europe. The European Community is in a position to pay a lot more than they have in the past. We seem to have a desire to try to stay over there and control it. They don't want us to control it, very candidly. So it I think is very important for us to let them assume more and more of the burden and for us to bring that money back here and rebuild our infrastructure. Because we can only be a superpower if we are an economic superpower, and we can only be an economic superpower if we have a growing, expanding job base.
BUSH: I vowed something, because I learned something from Vietnam: I am not going to commit US forces until I know what the mission is, until I know how they can come out. When you go to put somebody else's son or daughter into war, I think you've got to be careful.
PEROT: If we learned anything in Vietnam, it's you first commit this Nation before you commit the troops to the battlefield. This is basically a problem that is a primary concern to the European Community. But it is inappropriate for us, just because there's a problem somewhere around the world, to take the sons and daughters of working people that send their sons and daughters to war--our all-volunteer armed force is not made up of the sons and daughters of the beautiful people. It's very important that we not just, without thinking it through, just rush to every problem in the world and have our people torn to pieces.
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The above quotations are from The Clinton-Bush-Perot Presidential Debates, Oct. 1992.
Click here for other excerpts from The Clinton-Bush-Perot Presidential Debates, Oct. 1992. Click here for other excerpts by Ross Perot. Click here for a profile of Ross Perot.
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