Documents / Official release
This release contains White House Exchange Mail records dated January 1998 to October 1999. Most of it is a transcript of a January 29, 1998 press briefing by Press Secretary Mike McCurry covering Iraq, Iran, the budget and the Lewinsky inquiry, plus a 1998 presidential speech. An October 19, 1999 email among Transnational Threats staff forwards a Florida Today article on how scientists expect alien contact would spark a media frenzy rather than a cover-up, describing the 1989 SETI detection protocol.
“Harder”1 page
34FE6299.FIN Page 7 of 14 http://classified/email/data_source/exchange/record/cd008/febl998/34fe6299.html 1/5/2010 and I would ask you to ask other people who care about Social Security reform about this - but it is their and our concern that were the President or on< the major leaders to come out with a specific detailed plan prior to the election, that it carries with it the risk that that would become a source o political gunfire prior to the election and that that could actually reduce rather than increase the prospects of Social Security reform. Q You said that in the past you used the budget surpluses to pay down tl national debt while you were waiting for a solution on Social Security. I MR. SPERLING: I'm glad that you asked that because there's been a lot think confusion maybe on that. Partly that's because this topic of the tru: fund is certainly a complex one. But let me try to be clear. right or wrong — but it is our opinion that creating an atmosphere where there could be a bipartisan centrist solution to Social Security is the best hope that happening. And it is our concern and the concern of many, many ot use it to pay down the national debt, how do you then retrieve the surph if you decide you need them to shore up Social Security? Our position was that nobody should pass legislation that drains the surj no one pass legislation that drains or spends the surplus until we know how much of the surplus is needed for a comprehensive Social Security plan. Under o planning, under our prospects, we see that — we don't see a surplus in ar significant form happening during the time period we are trying to get tl done. If our calculation on that were to change at some point, that would chan our view. But right now I think the best thing we could do is use this year to to have the kind of atmosphere we had in '97 in the balanced budget agreement, where we I think helped create an atmosphere where we could get togetl and come up with a bipartisan plan that might be harder for any person to do alone And I'd just say we had $400 billion of Medicare savings over 10 years, don't believe that if either the Democrats or Republicans had made that their platform in '97, that that would have happened. I think what happened is that we able to work together and come up with that at one time in a way that th was significant buy-off.
Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.