Chip Reid.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  Actually, I'm going to have to get my glasses out to read these --

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s a bad sign there, Chip.  (Laughter.)

Q    A little fine print -- a little fine print in the budget, Mr. President.  You said that this budget is not going to add to the credit card as of about the middle of the decade.  And as Robert Gibbs might say, I'm not a budget expert and I'm not an economist, but if you could just explain to me how you can say that when, if you look on page 171, which I'm sure you’ve read -- (laughter) -- it is the central page in this -- the deficits go from $1.1 trillion down to $768 billion, and they go down again all the way to $607 billion in 2015, and then they start to creep up again, and by 2021, it’s at $774 billion.  And the total over those 10 years, the total debt is $7.2 trillion on top of the $14 trillion we already have.  How can you say that we’re living within our means?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, here’s -- let me be clear on what I'm saying, because I'm not suggesting that we don’t have to do more. We still have all this accumulated debt as a consequence of the recession and as a consequence of a series of decisions that were made over the last decade.  We’ve piled up, we’ve racked up（击倒，获胜） a whole bunch of debt.  And there is a lot of interest on that debt.

So, in the same way that if you’ve got a credit card and you’ve got a big balance, you may not be adding to principal -- you’ve still got all that interest that you’ve got to pay.  Well, we’ve got a big problem in terms of accumulated interest that we’re paying, and that’s why we’re going to have to whittle down（削减，削弱） further the debt that’s already been accumulated.  So that’s problem number one.

And problem number two we already talked about, which is rising health care costs and programs like Medicaid and Medicare are going to -- once you get past this decade, going to start zooming up again as a consequence of the population getting older and health care costs going up more rapidly than incomes and wages and revenues are going up.

So you’ve got those two big problems.  What we’ve done is to try to take this in stages.  What we say in our budget is let’s get control of our discretionary budget to make sure that whatever it is that we’re spending on an annual basis we’re also taking in a similar amount.  That’s step number one.

Step number two is going to make -- is going to be how do we make sure that we’re taking on these long-term drivers and how do we start whittling down the debt.  And that’s going to require entitlement reform and it’s going to require tax reform.

And in order to accomplish those two things, we’re going to have to have a spirit of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.  And I think that’s possible.  I think that’s what the American people are looking for.  But what I think is important to do is not discount the tough choices that are required just to stabilize the situation.  It doesn’t solve it, but it stabilizes it.  And if we can get that done, that starts introducing this concept of us being able to, in a serious way, cooperate to meet this fiscal challenge.  And that will lay the predicate for us being able to solve some of these big problems over the course of the next couple of years as well.

So, again, I just want to repeat, the first step in this budget is to make sure that we’re stabilizing the current situation.  The second step is going to be to make sure that we’re taking on some of these long-term drivers.  But we’ve got to get control of the short-term deficit as well, and people are going to be looking for a signal for that, and the choices that we have made are some pretty tough choices -- which is why I think you have been seeing some grumblings not just from the other party but also from my own party about some of the decisions that we make.

Chuck Todd.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  Everything you have talked about -- tax reform, the entitlement reform, two parties coming together just happening in December in your fiscal commission.  You had a majority consensus to do all this.  It has now been shelved.  It seems that you have not taken -- I guess my question is what was the point of the fiscal commission?  If you have this moment where you had Tom Coburn, your conservative friend in the United States Senate, sign on to this deal; Judd Gregg was also on this thing; you had Dick Durbin, your good friend from Illinois, Democrat -- everything you just described in the answer to Chip and the answer to Ben just happened.  Why not grab it?

THE PRESIDENT:  The notion that it has been shelved I think is incorrect.  It still provides a framework for a conversation.

Part of the challenge here is that this town -- let’s face it, you guys are pretty impatient.  If something doesn’t happen today, then the assumption is it’s just not going to happen.  Right?  I’ve had this conversation for that last two years about every single issue that we worked on, whether it was health care or "don't ask, don't tell," on Egypt, right?  We’ve had this monumental change over the last three weeks -- well, why did it take three weeks?  (Laughter.)  So I think that there’s a tendency for us to assume that if it didn’t happen today it’s not going to happen.

Well, the fiscal commission put out a framework.  I agree with much of the framework; I disagree with some of the framework.  It is true that it got 11 votes, and that was a positive sign.  What's also true is, for example, is, is that the chairman of the House Republican budgeteers didn’t sign on.  He’s got a little bit of juice when it comes to trying to get an eventual budget done, so he’s got concerns.  So I’m going to have to have a conversation with him, what would he like to see happen.

I’m going to have to have a conversation with those Democrats who didn’t vote for it.  There are some issues in there that as a matter of principle I don't agree with, where I think they didn’t go far enough or they went too far.  So this is going to be a process in which each side, both in -- in both chambers of Congress go back and forth and start trying to whittle their differences down until we arrive at something that has an actual change of passage.  

And that's my goal.  I mean, my goal here is to actually solve the problem.  It’s not to get a good headline on the first day.  My goal is, is that a year from now or two years from now, people look back and say, you know what, we actually started making progress on this issue.

Q    What do you say, though -- it looks like, no, you first; no, you first -- and nobody -- everybody says --

THE PRESIDENT:  But there will --

Q    -- but nobody wants to talk about --

THE PRESIDENT:  Chuck, there was this -- this was the same criticism people had right after the midterm election.  If you had polled the press room and the conventional wisdom in Washington after the midterm, the assumption was there's no way we were going to end up getting a tax deal that got the majority of both Democrats and Republicans.  It was impossible, right?  And we got it done.

So this is not a matter of you go first or I go first.  This is a matter of everybody having a serious conversation about where we want to go, and then ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.  And I think that can happen.