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clip tieng anh : Sat Mar 17, 2012 2:35 am
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 | clip tieng anh : Mark: Um, I’m kind of nervous. We have the President of the United States here! Obama: Well , thank you so much Facebook for hosting this, first of all. My name is Barrack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie. Obama: And in fact, if you like, Mark, we can take our jackets off. Mark: Oh, that’s good. Obama: That’s better, isn’t it? Mark: So let’s start off with the conversation about the debt. So I understand that yesterday morning you had a Town Hall in Virginia where you talked about your framework not only for resolving the short-term budget issues but the longer- term debt. And you spend some time talking about tax reforms and some cost cutting but you also spend a lot of time talking about things that you didn’t think that we can cut: education, infrastructure, and clean energy. So my question to kind of start off is: What specifically do you think we should do? And what specifically do you think we can cut in order to make this all add up? Obama: Right now, we face a critical time where we’re gonna have to make some decisions: how we bring down the debt in the short term and how do we bring down the debt over the long term. In the short term, Democratics and Republicans now agree we’ve got to reduce the debt by about four trillion dollars over the next ten years. And I know that sounds like a lot of money. It is. But it’s doable, if we do it in a balanced way. What I proposed was that about 2 trillion dollars over ten or twelve years is reduction and spending. Government wastes just like every other major institution does and so there are things that we do that we can afford not to do. Now there’s something that I like to do, are fun to do, but we just can’t afford them right now. So we made cuts in every area. A good example is Pentagon spending, where Congress often times stuffs weapon systems in the Pentagon budget that the Pentagon itself says we don’t need. But special interests and constituencies help to bloat the Pentagon budget so we’ve already reduced the Pentagon budget by about four hundred billion dollars. We think we can do about another four hundred billion dollars. So we get a look at spending both on non- security issues as well defense spending.And then what we’ve said is, let’s take another trillion of that that, that we’ve raised through a reform in the tax system that allows people like me and frankly, you Mark, for paying a little more in taxes. Mark: I’m O.K. with that! Obama: I know you’re ok with that. Keep in mind what we’re talking about is going back to the rates that existed when Bill Clinton was president. Now, a lot of you were…. I’m trying to say this delicately…still in diapers that time but for those of you who recall the economy was booming and wealthy people were getting wealthier. There wasn’t a problem at that time. If we go back to those rates alone that by itself would do a lot for us in terms of us reducing our over-all spending. And we can get a trillion dollars on the revenue side and 2 trillions in cutting spending we can still make investments in basic research. We can still invest in something we call ARPA – E, which is like DARPA, except just focused on energy so that we can figure out what are the next breakthrough technologies that can help us reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. We can still make investments in education, so we’ve already expanded the Pell Grant program so that more young people can go to college. We’re investing more in STEM education, math and science, and technology education. We can still make those investments. We can still rebuild our roads and our bridges, invest in high speed rail and invest in the next generation of broadband and wireless and make sure everybody as access to the Internet. We can do all those thing while still .bringing down the deficit medium term. There’s one last component of this. I know this is a long answer but I wanted to make sure everybody had the basic foundations for it. Even if we get this four trillion dollars, we do still have a long term problem with Medicare and Medicaid because with healthcare costs, the inflation goes up so much faster than wages and salaries. And this is where there’s another big philosophical debate with Republicans because what I’ve said is, the best way for us to change it is to build on the health reform that we had last year and start getting a better bang for our healthcare dollar. We waste so much on healthcare. We spend about twenty percent more than any other country on earth and we have worse outcomes because we end up having multiple tests when we could just do one test and have it shared among physicians on Facebook, for example. We could focus on the chronically ill, twenty percent of the patients account for eighty percent of the costs. So doing something simple like reimbursing hospitals and doctors for reducing the re-admissions rate and managing somebody with a chronic illness like diabetes so that they’re taking their meds on a regular basis so that they don’t come the emergency room. That saves huge amounts of money, so that’s what healthcare reform was about last year or a year and a half ago and what we want to do is build on that and continue to improve the system. What the Republicans right now are saying is number one, they can’t agree to any increases in taxes, which means we’d have to cut out of that four trillions, all of it would come from education, transportation, areas that I think are critical for our long term future. So, for example, they propose 70 percent cuts in clean energy. Well, I don’t know how we free ourselves in dependence on foreign oil and any body who is paying gas prices knows there’s an economic component to this as well as environmental component to it. If we’re not investing in the basic research and technology that allows solar, wind and others to thrive and develop. At the same time, what they’ve said is let’s make Medicare into a voucher program so that retirees instead of knowing that they’re always gonna have healthcare, they’re gonna get a voucher that covers part of the cost and whatever healthcare inflation comes up is all gonna be on them. And if the health insurance companies do sell you a policy that covers your illnesses, you’re out of luck. I think it is very important for us to have a basic social safety net for families with kids with disabilities, for seniors, for folks who are in nursing homes, and I think it’s very important for us to invest in our basic research. We can do all those things but we’re only gonna be able to do it by taking a balanced to approach. And that’s what this big debate is all about right now. Alright? Mark: Alright. Oh sorry, don’t mean to cut off the applause. That’s a very thorough answer. Obama: No no. They were stunned by the length of that answer. PV BLL  | |
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