Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Today was the day the Obama administration decided to draw attention to some good economic news for a change. It announced the federal deficit has declined to $483 billion, the lowest level since 2007. The deficit had exceeded a trillion dollars each year during the president’s first term.
But as that news was breaking, the markets embarked on another roller-coaster day, and new polls showed many Americans are skeptical that any economic recovery has trickled down to them.
That was the setting as I sat down this morning with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Budget Director Shaun Donovan.
Secretary Lew and Director Donovan, thank you both for joining us.
You have some good news for a change today, the deficit down and continuing to go down to, what, 2.8 percent?
JACK LEW, U.S. Treasury Secretary: Correct.
GWEN IFILL: To what do you attribute that?
JACK LEW: Look, I think that if you look at where we were six years ago, we had an economy that was collapsing, we had unemployment, 700,000 jobs lost a month, and we had markets in chaos.
The President came into office and took tough action. He stabilized the economy. He put in place an economic program to create growth. He put in a program to reform our financial markets and over a period of years worked with Congress on a bipartisan basis to put in place a balanced set of measures to reduce our deficit, starting with the Affordable Care Act, which reduced the deficit, as well as providing a guarantee of health care coverage, and then doing spending reductions and revenue increases that came by making our tax system more fair.
It’s an enormous amount of progress to have seen the deficit drop by, you know, roughly two-thirds, and to reach a point where it’s — we’re now in a 10-year period, looking ahead, of sustainable fiscal policy, which is good for the economy. It means that the economy can not worry about crisis to crisis, and the economy can continue to grow. That’s a very good thing.
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