Obsessing On Long Term News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Accelerated rate. but the problem is that their access to capital for small businesses is really very, very difficult. so i think it's a slow trudge through the snow to get employment growth to happen at a more significant clip at this point. >> robert gibbs. >> just building off, mika, i think your first question is, you have people at home who are watching who may not have gotten in as the elevator went up. and i was surprised that the statistic you said, that the mutual fund horizon now is only 18 months. you think of it as i'm going to put it there, and it's going to go up and down for the...

And the idea that we're passing on $16 trillion, $17 trillion, this is representative of our generation, jon. this is representative of who we are, what we're passing on to the next generation. you know, none of us should stand by idly in thinking about what it is they're about to embrace. it's not worthy of our generation or theirs. so this whole debt issue, i think, is going to drive the younger generation like wars of the past have driven earlier generations. i was on a college campus not far from here recently. and the whole notion of debt and what they're about to be handed i think is a r...

And that's unfair. so the subsidy equals tens of billions of dollars to some of these banks, the taxpayers are standing behind it. we've been through too big to fail. let's not set ourselves up for disaster. let's figure out how to fix the situation and move on so that we do have, in fact, a healthy financial system that prepares us better for the 21st century. >> jon meacham? >> what are the lines now, the quick lines people always say is, well, don't worry, we'll just borrow it from china. the sense that we are so much in debt to your former posting. can you talk about how you see the credit...

Of washington, d.c., where there's been an awful lot of spending, and democrats would say a lot of investment. we hope a lot of that takes root. but even if it does, we're still deleveraging. and i thought it was fascinating, the article we were looking at yesterday about household debt is down, mika, but also more young people are carrying no debt, and "the wall street journal" story defined it as people -- households s 35 yes and younger are carrying less debt than ever before. that's a trend. there's a great part of that. that's great news on one part. other parts of that would make economi...

These years are critically important because if the republicans can't begin to mend some of these demographics, and that's about math, that's not about politics, you lose the youth 60/40. hispanic latinos, 70/30, asian-americans, 75/25, i mean, give me a break. you've got to work pretty hard to lose a demographic that temperamentally and philosophically is so closely aligned with traditional republican principles, you've got to fix some of those. >> jon, you're exactly right. we have so many opportunities, especially toward young voters. i always say when people are talking about demographics ...