17 Feb Funny comment by Obama lost in the first press conference
Found it! The gin quip from Obama’s first press conference.
See bolded text: the Obama I fell in love with on the campaign trail peeked his head out of all this seriousness.  “Ginned up”
Nice!
Question: Thank you, Mr. President. In your opening remarks, you talked about that, if your plan works the way you want it to work, it’s going to increase consumer spending. But isn’t consumer spending, or overspending, how we got into this mess? And if people get money back into their pockets, do you not want them saving it or paying down debt first before they start spending money into the economy?
Obama: Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that consumer spending got us into this mess. What got us into this mess initially were banks taking exorbitant, wild risks with other people’s monies based on shaky assets and because of the enormous leverage, where they had one dollar’s worth of assets and they were betting thirty dollars on that one dollar, what we had was a crisis in the financial system.
That led to a contraction of credit, which, in turn, meant businesses couldn’t make payroll or make inventories, which meant that everybody became uncertain about the future of the economy, so people started making decisions accordingly, reducing investment, initiating layoffs, which, in turn, made things worse.
Now, you are making a legitimate point, Chuck, about the fact that our savings rate has declined and this economy has been driven by consumer spending for a very long time. And that’s not going to be sustainable.
You know, if — if all we’re doing is spending and we’re not making things, then over time other countries are going to get tired of lending us money and eventually the party’s going to be over. Well, in fact, the party now is over.
And so the — the sequence of how we’re approaching this is as follows. Our immediate job is to stop the downward spiral, and that means putting money into consumer’s pockets. It means loosening up credit.
It means putting forward investments that not only employ people immediately, but also lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.
And — and that, by the way, is important, even if you’re a fiscal conservative, because the biggest problem we’re going to have with our federal budget is if we continue a situation in which there are no tax revenues because economic growth is plummeting at the same time as we’ve got more demands for unemployment insurance, we’ve got more demands for people who have lost their health care, more demand for food stamps. That will put enormous strains on the federal budget, as well as the state budget.
So the most important thing we can do for our budget crisis right now is to make sure that the economy doesn’t continue to tank. And that’s why passing the economic recovery plan is the right thing to do, even though I recognize that it’s expensive.
Look, I — I would love not to have to spend money right now. I’d love — you know, this notion that somehow I came in here just ginned up to spend $800 billion, you know, I mean, that wasn’t — that wasn’t — that wasn’t how I envisioned my presidency beginning. But we have to adapt to existing circumstances.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/09/obamas-opening-remarks-at_n_165440.html
No Comments