President Obama's Backyard Discussion on Women and the Economy (IVDEO)

President Obama holds a discussion on ensuring economic stability and opportunity for women in the backyard of the Foss family in Seattle, WA. October 21, 2010.



Highlighting a portion of his talk, that was aimed right at the Tea Party:

I think people have a legitimate concern, a legitimate worry, as to what are we doing to start -- now that we’re out of the immediate crisis but we’re only experiencing sluggish job growth at this point and sluggish economic growth -- how do we get back to a point where we’re living within our means? That’s an entirely legitimate concern. It’s a concern that I have. And we’re going to have to have a serious debate over the next several years about how to do it.

The problem I have with the argument the way it’s playing out right now in the country is that there’s a suggestion on the other side that somehow the problem with our debt and our deficits all arose magically the minute I took office, whereas in fact when I arrived at the White House I was inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit. We had taken record surpluses last time there was a Democratic President, and over the course of a decade moved to record deficits.

The big problems we have in terms of debt and deficits have to do with structural gaps between the amount of money we’re taking in and the amount of money we’re spending. And if we’re going to get serious about the deficit, then we’re going to have to look at everything: entitlements, defense spending, revenues. How do all those things fit together so that we can have a sustainable budget that invests in the things that we absolutely need for our long-term future, and we stop funding some things that are nice to have but we can’t afford.

And that’s going to be a tough conversation -- which is -- it’s interesting now when you listen to the Republicans talk about out-of-control government spending, and then you ask them, well, what would you cut, and there’s this deafening silence. And they’ll say things like, well, we’ll roll back health care -- except it turns out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care bill is actually going to reduce our deficit by over a trillion dollars over the next 20 years. So that would add to the deficit.

Then they’ll say, well, we’ll pull back the unused portion of the stimulus. Well, first of all, that’s -- most of it has already been spent and a big chunk of what hasn’t been spent are actually tax cuts, which they say they’re for.

And then they’ll say, well, we’ll roll back spending back to 2008 levels, without being clear that that would mean, for example, a 20 percent cut in education spending.

So one of the things that I think as voters everybody here should be doing is constantly asking people, when you say you want to get the budget under control, what exactly do you mean? What exactly are you going to do? And if they can’t answer the question then it means they’re not serious about it.