The Russians also have the biggest stock in the world of biological weapons and stocks of component parts. The Indians and the Pakistanis have nuclear weapons. There are lots of biological and chemical stocks around the world. For many years, during our administration, we paid the salaries of 20,000 of the 40,000 Russian scientists involved in nuclear, chemical or biological work, so they could be doing good positive things with us instead of being tempted, after some of them literally went six months without a paycheck to go to work for somebody that would do harm to us or to our friends and allies. We ought to do more of that. That's a big security issue and the United States ought to be in forefront of making this whole effort that started before I became president with the bipartisan effort of Senator Lugar and Senator Nunn, one of the founders of the DLC.

Then, we ought to get to real homeland security, to matters more important than that department. The Democrats have a stronger position here than the Republicans, as Senator Landrieu has been pointing out in Louisiana in the last two weeks. You can reorganize all you want, but what are you doing to protect the tunnels, the bridges, the water systems, the utility systems, to provide for adequate first responders, police and fire and people, to respond if there's an anthrax attack or a chemical release? The Democrats have pushed and pushed and pushed, against constant resistance from the Republicans, to provide adequate funding for these things. That's a national security issue, a homeland security issue that matters a lot more than where bureaucratic boxes are. We didn't say it in the last election and if we had, it would have made a difference in some of these races.

But it's not important for political reasons, it's important because people's lives are at stake here. I believe it and I believe we'll prevail if we stay together and advocate it.

We need to have a new energy policy. If we ever needed a reason to know we need more energy independence, more energy conservation, more alternative sources of energy, as a national security measure, here it is. We could also use some more oil from other places like the West Coast of Africa. It makes the pipeline deal I made for the Caspian Sea oil even more important. So, we need a comprehensive energy policy consistent with our national security.

Finally in the area of security, we need a positive agenda. We should never forget the reason most of you who, like me, are baby boomers, were able to grow up in the world we grew up in: the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan. When George Marshall and Truman, who had been through World War I and World War II and seen the world nearly destroyed, said you know, we ought to take a little bit of money and build a world with more partners and fewer enemies and try to win the Cold War and not to have World War III.

Look at the world we grew up in. I'm the oldest of the baby boomers. I was able to be the first person in my family to go to college. I was able to raise a child without having to worry about whether she was going to be blown up in a nuclear explosion. I was able to live the life of my dreams because George Marshall and Harry Truman understood that security was about more than scaring your enemies, that we needed to take a little money to build more friends and fewer enemies.

We need to do that today. We know how to do it. We know how to do foreign aid, we know how to do debt relief. We know how to get the 130 million kids in the world, who aren't in school, to go. I'll just give you one example. I recently went to Ghana with the great Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. We set up an institute for working capital for the poor in Ghana to do there what he did in Peru, to move poor people's assets into the legal system, so they could use them as collateral for credit and grow their economy internally. It was very exciting. I was walking to the airplane to leave when this women comes running up to me, waving a package. And she said, I work in a factory with 400 people, where we make shirts, and export them to the United States because you signed that bill opening America's markets to Africa and the Caribbean. So there are 400 people that have jobs because of that. Here's your shirt. And because I'm not subject to all these disclosure laws anymore, I took the shirt! I looked at it last night before I came.

You know what? Those 400 people don't want to plant bombs in America. They don't want their kids fighting in African tribal wars. They're not mad at us. They like us. They don't resent our wealth, our success or anything else because they think we want them to have it too.

We spent money in this debt relief initiative to help Honduras go from six to nine years of mandatory schooling. Every year of schooling in a developing country adds 10 to 15 percent to the annual income of a boy or a girl, for life. every year. They're not mad at us in Honduras. In Uganda, they doubled primary school enrollment and lowered class size. They're not mad at us. And they don't want their kids to be in African tribal wars either. We spend 10 billion dollars total in this kind of assistance, by far the smallest percentage of any country in the world. They say we're going up to 15 billion depending on how you count the money over the next couple of years. You know, it sounds like a 50 percent increase, big deal. I think Congress approved something on the order of 60 billion dollars in increases in homeland security and defense in one year. Well, positive assistance ought to be part of our security strategy, too, and the American people will buy it if you explain it to them in terms of the Marshall Plan.

If we don't have a security strategy, as long as the American people are in their present frame of mind, they will not hear us on these other issues.

Now that brings me to the economy. Our policy was simple. We wanted economic growth for everybody. We had almost 8 million people moved out of poverty as compared to 70,000 in the Reagan recovery; 100 times as many. We also had more millionaires and billionaires than ever before. Every time I see one of my Republican friends, I always remind them that they did better under us too. We are an equal opportunity prosperity people, we Democrats.

A guy came up to me at a multiple sclerosis banquet the other night. The guy was twice as big as me and he said, I'm a Republican and I voted against you twice. Then he said, I'd sure like to have you back now. It was funny. My point is, what do people in upper-income brackets need? We want low inflation, low interest rates, a good stock market with good investment opportunities. Then we ought to have enough sense to do something with the money we have. Now this tax cut that was adopted by the administration and the Congress was done before we knew what our income was going to be, what our expenses were going to be and what our emergencies were going to be. It turned out or income was down, our expenses were up, and we had one heck of an emergency. So, now we need to spend more money on defense and to stimulate the economy The problem with this tax cut is that too little stimulus in the short run and it's too little responsibility in the long run. It's going to give us a long term permanent deficit without juicing the economy now.

I can only tell you what I think and I realize it's easy for me to say because I don't have to run for anything. But I think we ought to freeze at least the top rate, 400,000 and above, which affects one half of one percent of us and raise the ceiling on the estate tax but not get rid of it. If you did that, you could save 1.4 trillion dollars over the next two decades. If you freeze the top two rates, that's 200,000 - 400,000 dollars, you could save two trillion dollars and make up over half the shortfall in Social Security. Now, let me remind you that if you froze it, people in upper income levels would already get a 10,000 dollar tax cut, which is more than ten times as much as the average person is going to get when the whole thing is phased in completely. No Democrat is talking about repealing the tax cut or raising anybody's taxes.

I think it is amazing that we have a situation here, where we're not stimulating a distressed economy, and we're creating long term fiscal irresponsibility, which is bad for rich people because it means interest rates are going to be higher down the road. In this environment, where everybody wants to be asked to sacrifice, the poor are being asked to give up after school programs and training programs. Working people are being told we can't extend unemployment insurance and oh, by the way, we're going to deplete Social Security and Medicare trust funds, yet most of us in this room, who can afford to support the DCL, are being told our sacrifice is to expend the energy necessary to open the envelope containing our tax cut. Now that's bad ethics, bad policy and horrible economics. Too many people are scared that we can't explain that to average people, but we're not taking anything away from anybody. Even I get to keep my ten grand.

Instead, this money should go, in my opinion, to stimulate tax cuts that will help the economy in the short run; to investment incentives that Senator Lieberman and a lot of other Democrats have called for them; to progressive rebates to people who will spend the money and juice the economy, to some incentives to help people who really feel insecure about their retirement in light of all that's happened over last two years; to have access to 401-K like plans; to incentives to build the energy security we need for people to develop alternative energy sources, energy conservation, technologies and to encourage people to buy them.

That's what I think we ought to do. We could be spending more money now to juice this economy and have longer term fiscal responsibility and every wealthy person in America, who would give up the rest of this tax cut, would make it back many times over the next decade in a stronger stock market and a more stable economy.

I also think we ought to regenerate our trade efforts. The president now has fast track authority. I think we ought to conclude this free trade agreement with Latin America. I think we should be much more active than we were in the Argentine crisis in trying to help avoid these kinds of crises. You know people made fun of me over and over again because I helped Mexico, Brazil, and other countries. All I know is it paid off big time. We made friends, we had stable trading partners. We had more economic growth. I was just down in Mexico. It reminded me of the day I agreed to loan Mexico 13 and a half billion dollars and put together a 50 billion dollar emergency package for them from international sources. There was a poll in the paper that said people were against it 81 to 15. Some people thought I had lost my mind, especially when the Republican Congressional leaders saw the poll and said, "We can't support you anymore."

But Mexico paid the loan back three years early with over 500 million dollars in interest. And the position of America there and what we avoided in terms of more narco-trafficking, more illegal immigration, more tensions on our borders, is light years different now. We need to be much more active in understanding the relationship of international economic problems, especially in our own backyard in Latin America, in trying to make good things happen there. A lot of our growth in the early years came from the fact that our trade with Latin America was exploding. For most of the years I was president, that's where most of our trade expansion came. So, I think we need to reinvigorate these efforts.

We should give more serious thought to what kinds of research we should be targeting with all the government research dollars. For example, we spent probably over a billion dollars of your tax money in my presidency investing in nano-technology, super micro-technology. There's no doubt in my mind that the sequencing of the human genome, coupled with this diagnostic capacities of nano-technology, will bring us to the point where, in the next few years, we'll be able to diagnose most tumors that are presently undiagnosable. We'll be able to save thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of lives over a decade in a way that would be enormously beneficial to the American economy.

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