White House Press Secretary Squashes Tax Hike RumorWhite House Press Secretary Squashes Tax Hike Rumor
MR. GIBBS: The President is committed to doing those things. The President was clear in the campaign about that. I think in some ways those goals overlap. We’re not going to make progress on the deficit without dealing with health care.
So some of those goals actually work in tandem. I don’t think we’re going to get the deficit under — begin to get the deficit under better control until we get the economy moving again. In order to get — lay that new foundation, the President strongly believes that health care reform is important. The President was clear during the campaign about his commitment on not raising taxes on middle-class families. And I don’t think any economist would believe that in the environment that we’re in raising taxes on middle-class families would make any sense, and the President agrees.
Q Then why didn’t Secretary Geithner and Dr. Summers say that they would not raise taxes on those families?
MR. GIBBS: Well, having — I did not watch the shows; I read some of the transcripts — I think they allowed themselves to get into a little bit of a hypothetical back and forth. I will say this, and I think this is important for all of us to understand, and we’ve talked about this issue throughout the team that we’ve been here: We do have big, structural deficits that are going to have to be dealt with in order to meet the President’s commitment of cutting this deficit in half and getting us back on a path toward fiscal responsibility. That there’s no question about.
And I think what they both talked about was, one, we’re not going to have — we’re not going to be able to sustain any sort of economic recovery unless or until we do have a path toward fiscal responsibility. But they also said that that shouldn’t be done in a — as a way of burdening middle-class families.
So I think the President’s commitment on this is clear. We have a lot of big challenges. We’re already looking at ways to cut wasteful spending. As part of health care reform, the President has identified half a trillion dollars in spending that he thinks can be cut. We’ve worked just in the past two weeks on a bipartisan basis to look at a program like the F-22 and cut some of that wasteful spending out of the budget as well.