Obama: We Are Out Of Money Now

This came from an interview Saturday with CSPAN. There was little coverage by the mainstream media about this very important and market moving statement. This an incredible and irresponsible statement from the President of The United States. Although he speaks the truth, it is important that the president exude confidence in the country, it's finances and it's future. Last week the dollar was taken out to the woodshed and Treasurys joined in. This statement may encourage further selling next week, especially from foreigners. Mr. Obama should leave it to others to say we are broke.-Lou

'WE'RE OUT OF MONEY

Sat May 23 2009

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: "We are out of money."C-SPAN host Steve Scully broke from a meek Washington press corps with probing questions for the new president.

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, 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...