President Obama’s Press Conference On The Deficit

From the White House; “President Obama holds a news conference to discuss the status of efforts to find a balanced approach on deficit reduction.” July 11, 2011. The President said it was time to eat our peas. “I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension. That is just not an acceptable approach. And if we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season when they are all up. It’s not going to get easier, it’s going to get harder. So, we might as well do it now. Pull off the band-aid. Eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when? We keep on talking about this stuff, and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit, how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren. Well, let’s step up. Let’s do it,” the President said. According to Obama he has, “bent over backwards to work with the Republicans to try to come up with a formulation that doesn’t require them to vote sometime in the next month to increase taxes. What I have said is, identify a revenue package that makes sense, that is commensurate with the sacrifices we are asking other people to make and then I’m happy to work with you to figure out how else we might do it.” Obama wished they were discussing anything else adding, “We are not out here trying to use this as a means of doing all these really tough political things. I would rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes like new programs or the NFL season getting resolved. Unfortunately, this is what’s on our plate. It’s before us right now and we’ve got to deal with it. What you are right about, I think, is that the leaders in the room here, at a certain point, have to step up and do the right thing regardless of the voices in our respective parties that are trying to undermine that effort.”