You Must Be From Away

He needs to come up with a speech as good as Michael Douglas’s character’s in “The American President”

Something like this.

My fellow Americans

The issue at the heart of the debt limit discussion is as simple as this:

If you or I stop paying off our bank loan or our monthly credit card bill, the bank will most likely set a debt collection agency onto us.

That will ruin our credit rating.

Anyone who is prepared to lend us money in future will demand a higher rate of interest to cover their risk, if they’re prepared to lend to us at all.

If this country’s debt limit is not raised, America can’t pay its bills and it can’t pay interest to the people who have lent us money

That will ruin our country’s credit rating.

Anyone who is prepared to lend us money in future will demand a higher rate of interest to cover their risk.

It could also have a major effect on the world economy.

Some politicians claim that this won’t happen.
Rating agencies and the financial markets say that it will.

Some politicians are demanding that we cut spending to make sure that we don’t spend more than we take in in taxes.

We’re doing that.

We’re cutting spending on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

We’re also looking to increase the Government’s revenues by about a quarter of that.
This not a tax increase – it’s simply closing loopholes and removing exemptions that benefit only the very wealthiest of our citizens.

Republicans in both Congress and Senate are refusing accept this.

The reason that we as a country have this debt is because we spend more than we earn.

Government spending doesn’t just come out of thin air.

Government spending comes from initiatives passed by Congress and signed into law by the President.

These aren’t new laws and the debt that we have isn’t caused by new spending.

We need to raise the debt limit to pay for spending that Congress has already approved.

Why did our spending increase so rapidly during the later years of the Bush administration and the first two years of this administration?

Because we’re fighting two wars that this administration inherited and we’re struggling out of the most serious global financial crisis since the Great Depression, caused by the irresponsibility and greed of some banks and financial institutions and resulting in too many Americans losing their homes and their jobs.

If people don’t have jobs, they don’t pay income tax and they draw unemployment benefits.

Simply put, your government has to spend more and has a lower income.  That’s how a deficit develops.

There is a broad bipartisan understanding that we need to have balanced budgets and that we need to reduce our debt.

I believe that wage earners and the very rich need to share this burden.

Republicans in Congress and in the Senate think otherwise.

They insist that debt reductions be paid for by the alarm clock Americans – people who get up every day and go to work to pay their bills and their taxes.

Republicans in Congress and in the Senate don’t think that the super rich should give up any of their privileges and they’re prepared to put the financial stability and well-being of this country at risk to prove an ideological point.

They’re blackmailing this country to protect tax loopholes for private jets.

We have no more time to play political games.

This administration is serious about putting America’s finances on a firm footing and we need an increase in the national debt ceiling – something that all previous Congresses and Senates have approved as a matter of course – to tide us over until the reductions we propose start to take effect

Republicans in Congress and in the Senate need to listen to their constituents and they need to act swiftly, responsibly and in the interest of the nation in approving this measure.

Thank you and God bless America.