Obama steals Judd Gregg’s lines
For months, Sen. Judd Gregg has been using the word “unsustainable” to refer to the massive federal debt piled up by President Obama’s spending. In his town hall meeting in New Mexico yesterday, Obama stole Gregg’s lines. He said:
During a recession of this severity it is important, as I explained, for the government to step in and fill the hole in demand that was created by consumers and by businesses, to get the economy kick-started.
But the long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can’t keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries — (applause) — because part of it is, we have to pay for — we have to pay interest on that debt. And that means that we’re mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt, but what’s also true is that at some point they’re just going to get tired of buying our debt. And when that happens, we will really have to raise interest rates to be able to borrow, and that will raise interest rates for everybody — on your auto loan, on your mortgage, on — so it will have a dampening effect on the economy.
That’s exactly Gregg’s argument against the debt Obama himself has proposed in his own budget plan. It’s also the assessment the Congressional Budget Office made when it stated that the debt in Obama’s budget would contract economic activity by reducing the amount of credit available in the private sector.
Obama acknowledges those criticisms in principle, but simply ignores them as they apply to his own budget. Yet, by acknowledging them in principle, he acknowledges that his own budget will have a negative economic impact in the long term. And he gives opponents of his unprecedented deficit spending a little ammo. Not that it will do a lot of good as long as Democrats have a strong enough majority to rubber-stamp Obama’s agenda, but it’s nice to know that the President agrees that his own spending is “unsustainable.”
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