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SCHIEFFER: Let me just stay on Social Security with a new question for Senator Kerry, because, Senator Kerry, you have just said you will not cut benefits. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, says there's no way that Social Security can pay retirees what we have promised them unless we recalibrate. What he's suggesting, we're going to cut benefits or we're going to have to raise the retirement age. We may have to take some other reform.

But if you've just said, you've promised no changes, does that mean you're just going to leave this as a problem, another problem for our children to solve?

KERRY: Not at all. Absolutely not, Bob. This is the same thing we heard -- remember, I appeared on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert in 1990-something. We heard the same thing. We fixed it. In fact, we put together a $5.6 trillion surplus in the '90s that was for the purpose of saving Social Security.

If you take the tax cut that the president of the United States has given, President Bush gave to Americans in the top 1% of America, just that tax cut that went to the top 1% of America would have saved Social Security until the year 2075.

This president decided to give it to the wealthiest Americans in a tax cut. Now, Alan Greenspan, who (sic) I think has done a terrific job in monetary policy, supports the president's tax cut. I don't. I support it for the middle class, not that part of it that goes to people earning more than $200,000 a year, and when I roll it back and we invest in the things that I have talked about to move our economy, we're going to grow sufficiently, it would begin to cut the deficit in half, and we get back to where we were at the end of the 1990's when we balanced the budget and paid down the debt of this country. Now, we can do that.

Now, if later on, after a period of time we find that Social Security is in trouble, we'll pull together the top experts of the country. ['Cause hiring the right guy is the way I solve all problems...] We'll do exactly what we did it he 1990s and we'll make whatever adjustment is necessary, but the first and most important thing is to start creating jobs in America.

The jobs the president is creating pay $9,000 less than the jobs that we're losing, and this is the first president in 72 years to preside over an economy in America that has lost jobs, 1.6 million jobs. Eleven other presidents, six Democrats and five Republicans, had wars; had recessions; had great difficulties; none of them lost jobs the way this president has.

I have a plan to put America back to work. And if we're fiscally responsible and put America back to work, we're going to fix Social Security.

SCHIEFFER: Mr. President?

BUSH: He forgot to tell you he voted to tax Social Security benefits more than one time. I didn't hear any plan to fix Social Security. I heard more of the same.

He talks about middle-class tax cuts. That's exactly where the tax cuts went. Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. And now the tax code is more fair. Twenty percent of the upper-income people pay about 80 percent of the taxes in America today because of how we structured the tax cuts.

People listening out there know the benefits of the tax cuts we passed. If you have a child, you got tax relief. If you're married, you got tax relief. If you pay any tax at all, you got tax relief. All of which was opposed by my opponent, and the tax relief [me!] was important to spur consumption and investment to get us out of this recession.

People need to remember, six months prior to my arrival, the stock market started to go down, and it was one of the largest declines in our history. And then we had a recession and we got attacked, which cost us 1 million jobs, but we acted. I led the Congress: We passed tax relief[me]. Now this economy is growing; We added 1.9 million new jobs over the last 13 months. Sure, there's more work to do. But the way to make sure our economy grows is not to raise taxes on small-business owners; It's not to increase the scope of the federal government; It's to make sure we have fiscal sanity and keep taxes low.