Obama charges that GOP budget plans don’t add up
MELBOURNE, Fla. -- President Obama attacked Republican budget-cutting principles as bad “arithmetic” Sunday morning, telling a CBS interviewer that the refusal to balance spending cuts with higher revenues “doesn’t add up.”
Obama said he is “more than happy to work with Republicans” on cutting the deficit and is still willing to cut $2.50 in spending for every dollar in increased revenue.
“Gov. Romney said he wouldn’t take a deal with $10 of spending cuts for $1 of revenue increases. And the problem is the math, or the arithmetic, as President Clinton said, doesn’t add up,” Obama said in a pre-taped interview on “Face the Nation.”
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Although Republicans have rejected Obama’s proposed ratio, the president told Scott Pelley that the subject should be open again for discussion this fall.
That’s part of what this election’s about,” Obama said. “You can’t reduce the deficit unless you take a balanced approach that says, ‘We’ve gotta make government leaner and more efficient,’ but we’ve also got to ask people like me or Gov. Romney who have done better than anybody else over the course of the last decade and whose taxes are just about lower than they’ve been in the last 50 years to do a little bit more.”
In a bus tour across central Florida this weekend, Obama is urging audiences not just to show up and vote but also to “rally around” the set of principles he is outlining.
If Americans weigh in in support of those principles, he says, maybe they can break the partisan gridlock in Washington during a second Obama term.
He also plans to talk about Medicare and Medicaid, government health programs that both benefit seniors. In his interview with Pelley, Obama said he is willing to “make some adjustments” to the programs.
“But the way to do that is to keep healthcare costs low, it’s not to voucherize programs so that suddenly seniors are the ones who are finding their expenses much higher,” he said.
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