MODERATOR: From historic Danville, Kentucky, good evening. The only vice presidential debate sponsored by the council on presidental debates. We're on the cam us of Centre College. To president John raush, the faculty, students and community leaders state wide we thank you for hosting this debate. The candidates are the Republican nominee, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of Wyoming and the Democratic nominee, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. The commission, these candidates and their campaign staffs are agreed to the following rules. A candidate shall have two minutes to respond to the moderator's question. The other candidate shall have two minutes to comment on the question or the first candidate's answer. When I exercise the moderator's discretion of extending discussio n of a question, no candidate may speak for more than two minutes at one time. This audience has been told no disruptions will be tolerated. A prior coin toss has determined that the first question will go to the Democratic candidate. Senator, few hard working Americans would base their well-being on bonuses they hope to get five or ten years from now. Why do you, and you, secretary Cheney, predict surpluses you cannot possibly guarantee to pay for your proposed programs? LIEBERMAN: Before I answer that very important question, let me first thank you for moderateing the debate. Let me thank the wonderful people here at Centre College and throughout Kentucky for being such gracious hosts and let me give a special thank you to the people of Connecticut without whose support over these last 30 years I would never have had the opportunity Al Gore has given me this year. And finally let me thank my family that is here with me. My wife Hadassah, our children, our siblings and my mom. My 85-year-old mom gave me some good advice about the debate earlier today. She said, sweetheart, as she's prone to call me, remember, be positive and know that I will love you no matter what you're opponent says about you. Well, mom, as always, that was both reassuring and wise. I am going to be positive tonight. I'm not going to indulge in negative personal attacks. I'm going to talk about the issues that matter to the people of this country, education, health care, retirement security and moral values. I'm going to describe the plan that Al Gore and I have for keeping America's prosperity going and m aking sure that it benefits more of America's families, particularly the hard-working middle class families who have not yet fully benefitted from the good times we've had. And Bernie, I'm going to explain tonight how we're going to do all this and remain fiscal le responsible. Let me get to your question. MODERATOR: You have about ten seconds. LIEBERMAN: We're not spending anymore that is projected from the experts. We're setting aside $300 million in a reserve fund. The projections the non-part son experts make aren't quite right. Keeping America out of debt is a way to keep interest rates down and the economy growing. MODERATOR: Secretary Cheney. CHENEY: I want to thank the people here in Danville, Kentucky and I'm delighted to be here tonight. I want to avoid an y personal attacks. I promise not to bring up your singing. [LAUGHTER] LIEBERMAN: I promise not to sing. CHENEY: I think this is extraordinarily important decision we'll make on November 7th. We're really going to choose between what I consider to be an old way of governing ourselves of high levels of spending, high taxes, ever more intrusivece burr October razzy and we want to offer that new course of action. With respect to the surplus, Bernie, we have to make some kind of forecast. We can't make 12 month decisions in this business. We're talking about the kinds of fundamental changes in programs and government that are going to affect people's lives for the next 25 or 30 years. And while it may be a little risky in some respects from an economic standpoint to try to forecast surpluses I think we have to make some planning assumption to proceed. We care a great deal about the issues at stake here. One of the difficulties we have, frankly, for the last eight years we ignored a lot of these problems. We haven't moved aggressively on Social Security, on Medicare. There are important issues out there that need to be resolved. It's important for us to get on with that business. That's what Governor Bush and I want to do. MODERATOR: You alluded to problems. There's no magic bullet, secretary Cheney in this question to you. No magic bullets to solve the problems of public education. What is the next best solution? CHENEY: I think public education is a solution. Our desire is to find ways to reform our educational system, to return it to its former glory . I'm a product of public schools, my family, wife and daughters all went to public schools. We believe very much in the public school system. But if you look at where we are from the standpoint of the nation, recent exams, for example the national assessment of educational progress, independent testing service shows there's no progress oh reading scores in the last eight years. Almost no prob progress on math. We've had a significant increase in spending for education nationwide but it has proud almost no positive results. That's unacceptable from our standpoint. If you look at it and think about it, we now have in our most disadvantageed communities 70% of our fourth graders can't read at the basic level of the we've graduated 15 million kids from high school in the last few years who can't read a t a significant level. What we want to do is to change that. We think we know how to do it. Governor Bush has done it in Texas. We want to emphasize local control. We want to insist on high standards. One of the worst things we can do is fail to establish high standards. To say we don't have the same kind of expectations from you that we have from everybody else. We want accountability. We have to test every child every year to know whether or not we're making progress with respect to achieving those goals an objectives. We think it's extraordinarily important. Probably the single most important issue in this campaign. Governor Bush has made it clear that when he's elected this will be his number one priority as a legislative measure to submit to the Congress. MODERATOR: Senator. LIEBERMAN: Al Gore and I are committed to making America's public schools the best in the world. I disagree with what my opponent has said. A lot of progress has been made in recent years. Average testing scores are up and a lot of work is being done by tens of thousands of patients, teachers and administrators all around America. There is more to be done. If you'll allow me I want to go back to your last question. It leads to this question. I think both of us agree that leaving aside the Social Security and Medicare surpluses, there's one $1.8 trillion in surplus available to spend over the next ten years. We're being fiscally responsible about it. We're taking $300 billion after the top to put in reserve fund. The rest we'll use for middle class tax cuts and invest in programs like education. There's a big difference between these two tickets. Our opponents with spend $1.6 trillion of the purchase plus proper jeted on the big tax cut that Al Gore talked about the other night so effectively. We're saving money to invest in education. You cannot reform education and improve it in this country without spending some money. Al Gore and I have committed $170 billion for that purpose. To recruit 100,000 new teachers to reduce the size of classrooms. To help local school districts build new buildings so our children are not learning in crumbling classrooms and we're not just going to stop at high school. We're going to go on and give the middle class the ability to deduct up to $10,000 a year in the cost of college tuition. Now, that is a tremendous life-saving ch ange which will help people carry on their education and allow them to develop the kinds of skills that will help them succeed in the hi-tech economy of today. MODERATOR: Very important issue, Bernie, maybe we could extend on education for a moment. MODERATOR: You're asking me to invoke the moderate or's discussion? CHENEY: Yes. MODERATOR: It is so granted. CHENEY: Thank you, sir. LIEBERMAN: Do I have a chance to respond? MODERATOR: The secretary will have two minutes and then you'll have two minutes. CHENEY: The question of the surplus drives a lot of what we're talking about here, Joe. If you look at our proposal, we take half of the projected surplus and set it aside for Social Security. Over $2.4 trillion. We talk roughly a fourth of it for othe r urgent priorities such as Medicare reform and education, several of these other key programs we want to support. And we take roughly one-fourth of it and return it in the form of a tax cut to the American taxpayer. We think it's very important to do that. It is a fundamental difference between our two approaches. If you look, frankly, by our numbers and the numbers the Senate budget committee which has totaled up all the promises that vice president Gore has made during the course of the campaign there's some $900 billion in spending over and above that surplus already and we still have a month to go in the campaign. The fact is that the program that we put together, we think is very responsible. Suggestion that somehow all of it is going for tax cuts isn't true. Another way to look at it is over the course of the next ten years we'll collect roughly $25 trillion in revenue. We want to take about 5% of that and return that to the American taxpayer in the form of tax relief. We have the highest level of taxation now we've had since World War II. The average American Family is paying about 40% in federal, state and local taxes. We think it is appropriate to return to the American people so that they can make choices themselves in how that money ought to be spent. Whether on education, retirement or on paying their bills. It is their choice and prerogative. We want to give them the opportunity to make those kinds of choices for themselves and we think this is a totally reasonable approach. MODERATOR: Senator? LIEBERMAN: Let me start with the numbers. With all respe ct the Senate budget committee estimates that Dick Cheney has just referred to are the estimates of the partisan Republican staff of the Senate budget committee. We're using the numbers presented by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. We start with an agreement which the surplus in the Social Security fund should be locked up and used for Social Security. That's where the agreement ends. We also agree and believe and pledge that the surplus in the Medicare trust fund should also be locked up with a sign on it says that politicians keep your hands off. Our opponents do not do that. In fact, they raid the Medicare trust fund to pay for, well, their tax cut and other programs that they can't afford because they've spent so much on the tax cut. Let me come back to the remaining $1.8 t rillion that we both talked about. The numbers show that $1.6 trillion goes to the big tax cut which as Al Gore said the other night sends 43% to the top 1%. Worse than that when you add on the other spending programs that our opponents have committed to, plus the cost of their plan to privateize Social Security they're $1.1 trillion in debt. That means we go back down the road to higher interest rates, to higher unemployment, to a kind of self tax increase on every American Family. Because when interest rates go up, so, too, do the cost of mortgage payments, car payments, student loans, credit card transactions. So if we've learned anything over the last eight years, it is that one of the most important things the government can do, the federal government, probably the most important, is to be fiscally responsible. And that's why Al Gore and I are committed to balancing the budget every year. In fact, the paying off the debt by the year 2012 when by our calculation our opponent's economic plan still leaves America $2.8 trillion in debt. MODERATOR: Time. The next question goes to you. Gentlemen, this is the 21st century. Yet on average an American working woman in our great nation earns 75 cents for each $1 earned by a working male. What do you males propose to do about it? LIEBERMAN: It's a good and important question. Obviously in our time, fortunately, great advances have been made by women achieving the kind of equality that they were too long denied. Bernie your question is absolutely right. Women actually the number I have is received 72 cents for every $1 a man r eceives in a comparable job. Al Gore and I have issued an economic plan in which we've stated specific goals for the future. And one of those goals is to eliminate the pay gap between men and women. It's unfair and it's unacceptable. And the first way we will do that is by supporting the equal pay act which has been proposed in Congress which gives women the right to file legal actions against employers who are not treating them fairly and not paying them equally. Secondly, we're going to do everything we can using governmental support of business agencies such as the small business administration to help women business owners have an opportunity to invest and begin businesses and make larger incomes themselves. And there are other rights and human rights laws that I think can come to p lay here. So bottom line, this is an unfair and unacceptable situation and even though, as the economy has risen in the last eight years, America's women have risen with it and received more income until women are receiving the same amount of pain for the same job they're doing as a man receives, we've not achieved genuine equality in this country. Al Gore and I are committed to closing that gap and achieving that equality. In so many families women are a significant bread earner or the only bread earner. So this cause effects not only the women but families and the children as well. MODERATOR: Mr. secretary. CHENEY: I share the view that we ought to have equal pay for equal work regardless of someone's gender. We have made progress in recent years but I think we have a ways to g o. It's not just about the differential with respect to women. If you look at our opponent's tax proposal, they discriminate between stay at home moms with children that they take care of themselves and those who go to work or who, in fact, have their kids taken care of outside the home. You in effect as a stay at home mom get no tax advantage under the Gore tax plan as opposed to Bush proposal it provides tax relief for everybody who pays taxes roef owe important to understand the things we're trying to change and address in the course of the campaign and what our agenda is for the future, or plans are for the few you are focus very much about giving as much control as we can to individual Americans, be they men or women, be they single or married, as much control as possible over their o wn lives. Especially in the area of taxation. We want to make certain that the American people have the ability to keep more of what they earn and then they can get to decide how to spend it. The proposal we have from Al Gore, basically, doesn't do that. It in effect lays out some 29 separate tax credits. If you live your life the way they want you to live your life. If you behave in a certain way you qualify for a tax credit and at that point you get some relief. Bottom line though is 50 million American taxpayers out there get no advantages at all out of the Gore tax proposal whereas under the Bush plan everybody who pays taxes will get tax relief. LIEBERMAN: Might I have an opportunity to respond? MODERATOR: I caution you if you do this consistently we won't cover a lot of topics. After the senator responds, you don't have to feel compelled to respond to the senator. Depending on what he says. LIEBERMAN: This is an important difference between us. I want to clarify it briefly if I can. The first thing is the tax relief program that we've proposed, one of the many tax credits for the middle class includes a $500 tax credit for stay at home moms just as a way of saying we understand that you are performing a service fo