We're going to hear a lot about one figure tonight, that's $87 billion. It's been said it's more or less the down payment on the war with Iraq, the war with Afghanistan, the ongoing war on terrorism. Can we please tonight have your vote, up or down, yes or no? And if yes, how do you pay for $87 billion?
Senator Kerry, beginning with you.
KERRY: Well, let me begin, Brian, by first of all saying I hope the fact that the ticker is down in both measures is not a reflection of the fact that all 10 of us are meeting here today.
(LAUGHTER)
Secondly, let me say that if George Bush rebuilds Iraq the way he rebuilds the United States, they're going to lose 3 million jobs over the course of the next two years.
I believe the $87 billion is at issue. I have introduced an amendment, together with Joe Biden, that calls on shared sacrifice in America. We need to ask the wealthiest people in our country to bear some of the burden, as our troops and as the middle class in America is bearing the burden.
And so, I believe if we're going to pass any money at all, it ought to come at the expense of President Bush's ill-advised, unaffordable tax cut, which is driving this country into deficit.
Secondly, there are some other conditions that I think are critical and, until I know how that comes out in the struggle, I can't tell you exactly where I'm going to vote.
I'd like to turn to President Bush's tax cuts, and your plans for them.
Congressman Gephardt and Governor Dean have suggested they will roll back the increases in the child tax credit and some other middle-class tax benefits.
Senator Kerry, you have suggested that anyone who walks away from the middle class is not a true Democrat. Are your colleagues abandoning the middle class?
KERRY: We Democrats fought hard to put those tax cuts in place, Ron. Those represent the efforts of Democrats to try to reach the middle class of America.
The 10 percent bracket wasn't George Bush's idea. It was our idea. It was in keeping with the spirit of our party to try to help the average American get ahead in a country where increasingly average Americans are getting stomped on, where there's an unfairness in the workplace, where corporate executives, as we've seen, are walking away with millions and sticking the average American with the bill.
I think Governor Dean is absolutely wrong. And he's wrong on his facts. The fact is that 32 million American couples get about $1,000 out of the tax cut. The fact is that 16 million American families get $1,500 to $3,000 from it.
Just ask Ted Walsh (ph) and Mia Gloss (ph) in Barrington, New Hampshire. He's a firefighter, she's a teacher. If Governor Dean has his way and Congressman Gephardt, they're going to pay $3,000 additional taxes.
We can cut the deficit in half, we can be fiscally responsible, but we don't have to do it on the backs of the middle class.
DEAN: And all due respect to Senator Kerry and the others from Washington that voted for these tax cuts, this is exactly why the budget is so far out of balance.
Washington politicians promising people everything. You can have tax cuts, you can have insurance, you can have special education. We cannot win as Democrats if we take that kind of attack.
Tell the truth: We cannot afford all of the tax cuts, the health insurance, special ed and balancing the budget, and we have to do those things.
The fact of the matter is that 60 percent of Americans at the bottom got $325.
That is not a tax cut. Whatever you got out there in tax cuts, the majority of Americans saw their kids' college tuition go up, their property taxes go up, because people like the friend–Senator Kerry's friend in Barrington got laid off because of the enormous tax cuts and no money coming to the states.
Let's call this one right. Let's be fiscally responsible and balance the budget.
Bob Graham and I are the only people up here that have ever balanced a budget and I think we ought to balance this budget and not promise more than we can deliver.
WILLIAMS: Congressman Gephardt, you get to answer a full question.
GEPHARDT: Thank you.
I don't agree with John. I think that's the wrong policy, and let me tell you why.
This plan has failed. The president's economic plan has failed. And we should not keep half of a failure or a quarter of a failure or two-thirds of a failure. If it's failed, let's change the policy. Let's do something else.
That's why I have a health care plan that I think will stimulate the economy much more than the Bush tax cuts, will create more jobs, put more people to work and solve a major, major problem that we have for every American.
The other thing I'd say is if you do what I'm saying, we'll go back to the Clinton tax code. That was (inaudible) tax code. I led the fight in 1993 to put those changes in place; it worked. And my plan will put more money into the average family (inaudible) Bush tax cuts in (inaudible).
WILLIAMS: Senator Kerry, I'll give you 30 rebuttal.
KERRY: Again, with Governor Dean, Governor Dean didn't balance this budget alone. The federal government gave him about 21 percent of that budget, in order to help balance it.
And the fact is that going back to the Clinton tax cuts, doesn't create another job, it puts a burden on current predicament of middle-class Americans. They lose their current revenue.
What's kept America's economy moving in the last two and a half years has been consumer spending. If all of a sudden, when we're trying to recover, we sucked a whole lot of money out of those consumers, we are not going to be able to keep the economy moving.
It's the wrong policy. We can have the deficit cut in half…
WILLIAMS: Time.
KERRY: … the way Bill Clinton did it.
WILLIAMS: Times is up for…
KERRY: And I believe we don't have to do it on the backs of the middle class.
Senator Kerry, you have accused Governor Dean of playing on workers' fears and advocating protectionism and saying that under him it threatens to throw the economy into a tail spin. It that fair?
KERRY: Yes, it is fair, because Governor Dean, on a number of occasions across the country, has said very specifically that we should not trade with countries until they have labor and environment standards that are equal to the United States.
That means we would trade with no countries. It is a policy for shutting the door. It's either a policy for shutting the door, if you believe it, or it's a policy of just telling people what they want to hear.
I think there's a middle ground that's smart for America. No president can shut the door to globalization and no president should.
President Clinton traded. We created 23 million jobs in the 1990s, we balanced the budget, we paid down the debt, we brought more women into the workforce than at any time in American history. We lifted a hundred times the number of people out of poverty of Ronald Reagan.
We can do that again, but we have to enforce trade agreements. We have to be fair in our trade.
And I intend to sign no trade agreement that doesn't have adequate labor and environment standards. I'm going to raise the enforcement level. But I'm not going to shut the door, because that would depress the economy of our country.
Governor Dean, you have said that the senator from Massachusetts lacks an understanding of the job loss in this country. You have heard the accusation from him.
DEAN: I think that's true.
You know, to listen to Senator Lieberman, Senator Kerry, Representative Gephardt, I'm anti-Israel, I'm anti-trade, I'm anti-Medicare and I'm anti-Social Security. I wonder how I ended up in the Democratic Party.
I'm not a new entrant to the Democratic Party. I've been here a long time.
I voted for–I supported NAFTA, I supported the WTO. We benefited in Vermont from trade.
But I have spent a lot of time in the Midwest in the last couple of years. Our manufacturing jobs are hemorrhaging. We have to go back and revise every single trade agreement that we have to include labor standards, environmental standards and human rights standards.
And if we don't, the trade policy that we seek to help globalize and help workers around the country and the world is going to fail. I want a successful trade policy, but I'm no longer willing to sacrifice the jobs of middle-class Americans in order to pad the bottom lines of multinational corporations.
Trade has to be fair to workers, not just multinational corporations. And I think Senator Kerry is insensitive to the plight of workers–American workers who have lost their manufacturing jobs.
WILLIAMS: Senator Kerry, rebuttal time, and then perhaps Congressman Gephardt.
KERRY: Well, I gave a speech in Detroit several days ago which reflects an economic policy that I've laid out over the last years that will address the manufacturing loss.
I'm not insensitive to the jobs. I'm desperately concerned about those jobs. But you don't fix them by pandering to people and telling them you're going to shut the door. You have to grow jobs.
We need to increase our commitment to science in America, to venture capital, to the kinds of incentives that draw capital to the creation of jobs.
Democrats can't love jobs and hate the people who create them.
WILLIAMS: Senator.
KERRY: We need to encourage job creation and trade, but fair trade, and I've shown how that can happen.
WILLIAMS: Time is up on that, Congressman. We'll try to get to you.
BORGER: Senator Kerry, you were shaking your head, and I'm wondering whether there's a rebuttal from you.
KERRY: Well, I agree completely with John Edwards.
First of all, no one is going to find $228 billion to put into health care. Nobody believes it's there, and it can't be found, number one.
Number two, it is given to those companies without any demand on the cost of health care in the country.
I've offered a plan which costs about $75 billion a year but which controls costs by pulling all the catastrophic cases–any case $50,000 or more we take out of the system and that reduces premiums across the country.
WILLIAMS: Senator?
KERRY: There's no command and control. It's not a government plan.
SEIB: Let me switch to a different subject, which is energy and energy security, and address this question to Senator Kerry and Senator Joe Lieberman.
Just yesterday, OPEC announced a production cutback and the price of oil jumped immediately. How can you say on one hand that there is a paramount economic and national security need to reduce dependence on imported, and specifically Middle Eastern, oil, while on the other hand oppose drilling in one section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska?
Senator Kerry, you first.
KERRY: Because the Arctic Wildlife Refuge won't provide a drop of oil for 20 years. And because the total amount of oil, if it were to come through at the level that some people in the oil industry predict, will amount to about a 1 to 2 percent reduction in the total dependency of the United States on oil.
We only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, Gerry. There is no physical or metaphysical way for the United States of America to drill its way out of this problem. We have to invent our way out of this problem.
And the sooner that we have a president who understands that and begins to commit America to the science, the discovery, to the alternatives, to the renewables, to begin to press America toward the great journey toward energy independence, the better off America will be, the better our health will be, the more effective our economy would be and, frankly, the better our national security will be and the better world citizen we will be.
I think the OPEC rise yesterday absolutely underscores the danger to the United States of this current dependency. We need to commit ourselves to energy independence now.
BORGER: This is to Senator Edwards, back on trade: You know that President Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel last year. Reports are that the administration is now considering rolling back those tariffs.
If you were president, what would you do?
EDWARDS: I supported the tariffs as the time. I think they were important, given the surge of steel that had come into the United States. I think it was the right thing to do. I supported it at the time.
We've just gotten a new report, which we're in the process of looking at–we're examining right now.
My reaction to what I've seen so far is it may be time to ease off on the tariffs. It may actually be the right thing to do, given the result of the report.
I also want to say something about the exchange that took place just a few minutes ago. We need to be really careful that our anger is not directed at each other.
The reason I want to be president of the United States is to change the course of America, to make sure that everyone in this country gets the opportunity that they're entitled to, no matter where they live or what they color of their skin, what family they're born into. That's the America I want to be build as president.
And I think those of us on this stage have an obligation, not just to the Democratic Party, but to the American people to make sure we do that.
WILLIAMS: Let me hop in for a quick rebuttal from Governor Dean.
What do you think about internecine warfare here among Democrats?
DEAN: I don't think we should ever have internecine warfare. And I promise never to have internecine warfare.
WILLIAMS: How about little flashes of anger?
DEAN: Well, little flashes of disagreement are going to happen from time to time.
The truth is that we have fundamental policy disagreements here. And what we really need to do is confront George Bush with what he's done to this country.
But I do think it's important that if folks are going to talk about us being like Newt Gingrich, that we're not going to stand for that. There is nobody up here that's like Newt Gingrich, and I think we have to understand that.
WILLIAMS: Senator Kerry, I'll give you 30 seconds, and then we really do have to…
KERRY: Well, in defense of Dick Gephardt, I didn't hear him say he was like Newt Gingrich, I heard him say that he stood with Newt Gingrich when we were struggling to hold on to Medicare. That's a policy difference.
It's also a policy difference when Governor Dean says that we could balance the budget by cutting veterans' benefits, cutting Social Security, cutting defense. “It'd be tough,” he says, “but we could do it.”
Now, I think these are policy difference that we need to discuss, and it's perfectly fair.
SEIB: Senator Kerry, Congressman Kucinich, Reverend Sharpton just mentioned the Grasso resignation over the compensation package. Does that episode suggest to you there should be some more legal oversight of the exchange or of the way corporate boards are put together?
KERRY: I think we need to democratize the process. Clearly, boards of directors need to be represented better with respect to shareholders. There are many things we can do. Look, this goes to the core of what we are and who we are as Americans. The reason to be concerned about it is not as a matter of targeting CEOs or being, you know, angry at business. It's because it's a matter of fundamental fairness of how we hold ourselves together as a country.
It goes to the core of how Americans ought to have a relationship between worker and those they work for. And that workplace has been abused. When you have misconduct in the boardroom, it's as bad as a mugging in the streets, except that in many ways it's broader because more people are hurt.
And many Americans are feeling mugged by what is happening in this country today, the fundamental unfairness.
KERRY: When you have a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, it breaks faith with the American people. I mean, one wishes that they built bridges in schools in America, because maybe then Bush would invest in them.
And that's the kind of thing we need to do.
What in office, as president, would be the least popular, most right thing you would do? Again, 30 seconds each.
KERRY: I think there are two things. Number one, young people don't believe that Social Security will be there for them. I intend to take the politics out of how we are going to guarantee that Social Security is sound into the future. And that requires leadership.
And secondly, I'm going to ask Americans to join in the great effort of living up to our responsibilities in a global plate basis, not unlike George Marshall did with the Marshall Plan. We need to rebuild all of our relationships in the world. We need to do a better job of making ourselves safe and creating cooperation. And that will require enormous leadership.
The transcript of the entire debate can be found here: September 25 Debate