This morning the President welcomed everybody back from the Thanksgiving break, and said he was looking forward to tomorrow's bipartisan meeting with Congressional leaders, making clear that "it’s time to get back to work." Before talking about the news of the day, namely his call for cutting the deficit by freezing Federal employee pay, the President spoke a little bit about how concerns about the economy and the deficit relate:
Now, there’s no doubt that if we want to bring down our deficits, it’s critical to keep growing our economy. More importantly, there’s still a lot of pain out there, and we can’t afford to take any steps that might derail our recovery or our efforts to put Americans back to work and to make Main Street whole again. So we can’t put the brakes on too quickly. And I’m going to be interested in hearing ideas from my Republican colleagues, as well as Democrats, about how we continue to grow the economy and how we put people back to work.
The President went through his various efforts to scrape tens of billions in saving out of the budget, from the line-by-line review, to aggressively going after improper government payments, to selling off $8 billion of unneeded federal land and buildings, to proposing a three-year freeze on all non-security discretionary spending — "a step that would bring that spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy in 50 years."
He then explained his decision announced today, which you can learn more about from OMB Director Jack Lew's blog post or our fact sheet:
Fonte: White House