Obama Says We're Out of Money

The Liberal-in-Chief tells the American nation the way it is.

This was too good of an opportunity to pass up. The Drudge Report posted a transcript of a question session between Barack Obama and C-Span host Steve Scully:

SCULLY: 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.

Well, duh. Wasn't that the point of the conservative reaction against President Obama and Congress? Wasn't that the point of the Tea Parties? Wasn't that why many conservatives broke with President Bush' spending policies?

I find the next part of Obama's answer quite telling about his ideas for reshaping American government:

OBAMA: 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...

Apparently, Obama's biggest problem with the economy is, get this, it will interfere with his plans to nationalize health care. And is he really saying that the problems with the budget stem from failed health care? (Silly me, I thought it was the trillion dollars in spending Congress passed this past year.) At least he admits that the system, as it is now, will crash and burn in the future.