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he promised to balance the budget, but he hasn t even tried. in fact, the budget he has submitted to congress nearly doubled the debt. we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back. $30,000 for every man, woman, and child. that s irresponsible. it s unpatriotic. i think mainly what that video prove, and those are just a few examples you can find plenty of republican and democratic examples over the generations it is irresistible to any politician politician to rail against deficits. it s scary to people. the bigger the number is, the scarier it gets. mark, you write about it in this book. all the conversation about chain cpi on the table, steps to get to a great bargain, a balanced budget, all that flows from the political power of sort of deficit hysteria and it is a ....
Don t know that we actually live in deficit hysteria because it s not like the american people want these entitlement cuts or cuts to services. i don t think there s a coincidence, though, that the deficit has spiked in terms when you poll the question you know, what are the top issues facing the country, we ve seen three spikes over the last 30 years in when the deficit has scored highly on that. one was in the early 1980s during the reagan recession, one in the early 1990s, the ross perot presidential campaign in 1982, built entirely around the deficit, and the third time is basically since the crash, 2008, 2009, to the present. but nonetheless, if you poll first of all, because people keep telling them. the republicans keep telling people and the president echoes it that economic growth will go down if you don t rein in the deficit, which is simply wrong. they re not hearing from anybody to the contrary, which almost any intelligent economist will say is the case. but the fa ....
Hospitals and doctors and providers go to end of life care for very sick and dying middle income people who shield or spend down their assets to be able to afford long term care, because we don t have a system in this country, but when it come air pairs to the average income, it does not say that sponer soed health care is part of the average income, and the money to the schools and the communities on the average middle-class sort of side is part of that. it also does a ridiculous thing where it counts the programs that go to people above the poverty line and then puts the denominator only below the poverty line. and finally, it creates a lie that we have an incredibly welfare state which is an important undercurrent of the war or government and the deficit hysteria, because if the government does not mean faa and food inspection s s to people, big gilded checks going to undeserving people, then yeah, i might be more supportive of the ....
Congressional budget office we ll take a relatively sharp hit to gdp and economic growth. and actually what is really dumb about these particular cuts is when you look at the federal budget at large, you are actually hitting the areas that make america the most competitive. if you re thinking about long-term economic growth, these are the areas, nih research, pre-k, elementary schools, higher education, it s the things over the long term that generally have made us and we re actually because of these deficit hysteria, we ve decided we need to hit the things that we should be most concerned about in order to achieve these things. but that s the nature of sequestration. let s be really clear. i don t think anybody here is defending sequestration. the across the board nature particularly of the cuts. that s where you start getting this sort of it s going to have this effect on teachers. but if you could target it, and i ve talked to people, for instance, in the pentagon. they re like ....
Funding and they need to craft a state plan that can use federal funding and more flexible ways, investing more in preschoolteachers salaries or may want to invest in facilities and curriculum, digital learning and preschools and looking closely, as well. lots of opportunities and lots of possibilities and i hope there s flexibility not being specific about how the funds should be spent. i think obama s in a little bit of a tough spot here, this is an ambitious and probably worthy plan and operating in a climate of deficit hysteria in washington and joan walsh writing at salon where i write and a lot of experience actually with pre-k policymaking wrote about it this way and saying when you look at the framework for 4 years partnering with the ....