"We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare"
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The number is doing the heavy lifting: $4 trillion isn’t policy detail so much as a moral yardstick. Obama uses it to box in the austerity crowd, implying that anyone serious about deficit reduction can’t hide behind symbolic trims. By naming “12 percent of the budget” and then filling that slice with unglamorous public goods - food inspectors, the weather service - he makes “discretionary spending” feel less like a spreadsheet category and more like the scaffolding of daily life. It’s a reminder that government, at its most defensible, is the stuff you only notice when it fails: contaminated food, missed storms, stalled cures.
The sentence is built as a two-sided refusal. First, he rejects the easy line-item cuts that play well on talk radio. Then he blocks the other politically familiar move: balancing the books on seniors’ backs. “We can’t just do it” is calibrated language - not a promise that Medicare will be untouched, but a warning against a fix that’s lazy, inequitable, and electorally explosive.
Contextually, this is Obama governing in the long shadow of the Great Recession and the post-2010 deficit panic, when “grand bargain” rhetoric competed with Tea Party demands for sharp domestic cuts. The subtext is coalition management: reassure liberals that the state’s capacity won’t be gutted, signal to moderates that math matters, and preempt Republicans from claiming fiscal seriousness while proposing cuts that are either too small to matter or cruel enough to define them.
The sentence is built as a two-sided refusal. First, he rejects the easy line-item cuts that play well on talk radio. Then he blocks the other politically familiar move: balancing the books on seniors’ backs. “We can’t just do it” is calibrated language - not a promise that Medicare will be untouched, but a warning against a fix that’s lazy, inequitable, and electorally explosive.
Contextually, this is Obama governing in the long shadow of the Great Recession and the post-2010 deficit panic, when “grand bargain” rhetoric competed with Tea Party demands for sharp domestic cuts. The subtext is coalition management: reassure liberals that the state’s capacity won’t be gutted, signal to moderates that math matters, and preempt Republicans from claiming fiscal seriousness while proposing cuts that are either too small to matter or cruel enough to define them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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