CSPAN is running an exclusive interview with President Obama today, in which he’s asked when the United States will run out of money due to the rising deficits. The president responds:
“We are already out of money.”
Via Drudge Report. More soon.
Update: Here’s the transcript from CSPAN:
SCULLY: Yet, it all (socialized health care) takes money. You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?
OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.
So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.
So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.
So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.
Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything. That’s the wrong option.
I think the right option is to say, where are the game changers, the investments that we can make now that are going to reduce costs, even if they don’t reduce them this year or next year, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, we are going to see substantially lower costs.
And if – one of the very promising areas that we saw was these insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, all these stakeholders coming together, committing to me that they would reduce costs by 1.5 percent per year.
If we do that, it seems like small number, we end up saving $2 trillion. $2 trillion, which not only can help deal with our deficit and our long-term debt, but a lot of those savings can go back into the pockets of American consumers in the form of lower premiums. That’s what we are driving for.
Did I mention that the deficit for this year alone is projected to be about $1.8 trillion? That figure has grown by approximately $600 billion since January, when the CBO projected $1.2 trillion for 2009. We’re borrowing about 50 cents for every dollar we spend. By the way, The American Spectator has more information on that $2 trillion savings.
by Stephan Tawney on Sat, May 23, 2009