Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr11/wh930622.zip/06-22D.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1993-06-23 | 8KB

From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail]  Tue Jun 22 02:54:30 1993
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1993 01:48-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Presidential Interview on KRLD Radio, Dallas, Texas 6.21.93

      E X E C U T I V E   O F F I C E   O F   T H E   P R E S I D E N T

                           THE WHITE HOUSE

                    Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                              June 21, 1993

                     INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT
              BY PHIL ADLER, KRLD RADIO; DALLAS, TEXAS

                           The Oval Office

Q: Mr. President, are you there?

THE PRESIDENT:  I am, Phil.

Q: Good morning to you.  We think that a lot of people responded to a
theme -- or at least I think so -- in the presidential campaign of
sacrifice to cut the deficit as long as that sacrifice is equal.  The
Btu tax was designed originally on the concept of equal sacrifice.
But then all of these exceptions were added and it really makes it
appear that it's one of the most complicated proposals ever.  Did you
make a mistake allowing all the special exceptions to be included in
the Btu tax?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I didn't allow them all to be included.  Some
of them were included in the House of Representatives bill, and I
didn't agree with all of them.  But let me say what I think was a
good criticism of the tax, and that is that we wanted the tax to
restrain energy consumption in ways that promoted energy conservation
and also supported fuel switching to more environmentally beneficial
and more available natural gas.  That bill, as drawn, would be a big
boon to the natural gas industry in Texas and Oklahoma and throughout
the United States.  And that's one of the things we were trying to
do.

Now, some of the oil companies didn't like it, but the people that
were in the gas business liked it.  We had a big Texas gas company,
headed by a person who strongly supported President Bush in the last
election, endorsed the economic program.  ARCO and Sun Oil both
endorsed the economic program, including the Btu tax.

So Secretary Bentsen who, as you know, has represented you in the
Senate for a long time, offered the Senate a modified Btu tax which,
instead of having all those particular exemptions would basically
have alleviated the burden of the Btu tax on industry and agriculture
on the production sector, but still given them an incentive to move
toward natural gas wherever possible, and would also have cut the Btu
rate and would have replaced that with more spending cuts.

Unfortunately -- from my point of view, unfortunately, we couldn't
pass that through the committee because Senator Boren had said he
wouldn't vote for any tax based on the heat content of fuel.  But I
still think it was a good concept, and it will be interesting to see
what happens if the Senate's version of the economic plan passes to
see what happens in the conference and what we come up with.

Q: What we have now is a gasoline tax that's been passed by the Senate
committee, and you've called that regressive in the past.  How can
you sell that, if you have to, to House members who did risk some
political capital by supporting you on the Btu tax?

THE PRESIDENT:  I think anything that comes out has to be combination
of agreement between the House and the Senate.  It's hard to get 218
House members and 51 senators to agree on anything that's tough.  I
mean, everybody can talk about cutting the deficit, but it's one
thing to talk about it and quite another to do.  But I think they'll
be able to do it.

No one was particularly happy with the form of the Btu tax, or very
few people were, that passed the House, but everybody thought that
Secretary Bentsen could come up with a plan that would make it good
for the economy and could achieve what we were trying to do in terms
of promoting domestic energy, and I think he did.

The Senate preferred a tax that was a gas tax and a tax on some other
fuels.  It, at least, is small enough so that it is not particularly
unfair to people in rural areas.  It's not as big as what some had
wanted -- and certainly I did not want just a big old gas tax; I
thought that was unfair.

I also think it's important to point out in Texas, in light of the
rhetoric in the recent political campaign, that it is simply not true
that there is no spending cuts in this plan.  There's $250 billion in
spending cuts, and they affect everything.  They affect agriculture
and veterans and Medicare and the whole range of discretionary
spending of the government.  They affect foreign aid, they affect
defense.  There are sweeping, broad-based spending cuts in this
program.  And the tax increases, two-thirds of them, fall on people
with incomes above $200,000, three-quarters on people with incomes
above $100,000.  Families of four with incomes below $30,000 are held
harmless, and people who work for a living 40 hours a week and have
kids in the house who are now in poverty would actually be lifted
above poverty by these tax changes in ways that promote the movement
from welfare to work.  So this is a fair and balanced plan.
It was developed, and in a very aggressive way, by Lloyd Bentsen and
by Leon Panetta who used to be Chairman of the House Budget Committee
to be fair, to have equal spending cuts in taxes, and to drive the
deficit down so we could               e could bring interest rates
down.  That's good for Texas and that's good for everybody in
America.  And also, it leaves some room for investments that are
critical to our future.

And, as you know, I support -- you were implying this before I got on
-- I support the space station and the supercollider projects because
I think they're good for America's future.  And if you're going to
spend money on those things, you have to spend money.  You can't play
games, they do cost some money.

QMr. President, how long can you guarantee that support for the
supercollider and the space station?  Will they fall if that's the
only way to meet your overall deficit reduction goal?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, my overall deficit reduction goals can be met
in my plan with the space station and the supercollider.  I do want
to emphasize that we've already shaved $4 billion off the five-year
budget for the space station and some money off the five-year budget
for the supercollider, by redesigning the space station based on a
team of exceptional national experts who analyzed the project and
recommended that it be redesigned and also that NASA's management be
changed rather dramatically.  And we just delayed the implementation
schedule on the supercollider some so that none of the opponents of
the space station and the supercollider could claim that there had
been no spending cut there.

So we have done that.  But I strongly feel it would be a mistake to
abandon those.  Now, I would be less than candid if I didn't tell you
that there are a lot of people in other parts of the country who want
to cut those projects.  There was always a lot of opposition to them
and in the last -- because of the last election and all of the
rhetoric and all the claims in Texas that there were no spending cuts
in this budget, that has given real energy to the opponents of the
space station and the supercollider.  It wasn't true that there were
no spending cuts, but there are a lot of people up there who have
been wanting to kill these projects for years who are just gleeful at
the way the rhetoric in the last election played out in Texas.  They
think that they have been given a license by the people of Texas to
kill the space station and the supercollider.  And it's going to be
very much harder for me to keep them alive.  But I'm doing the best I
can.

Q: Mr. President, I'm informed that our time is run out by one of
your aides, I believe.  Good to talk with you this morning.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  I enjoyed it.

                                 END