White House Concedes ‘Raw Math’ Shows National Debt Rising

Press Secretary Josh Earnest blamed insufficient tax hikes for the rising debt

EARNEST: "Mark."

KNOLLER: "One more on the president's speech last night. He said there is no economic metric by which we are not better off. Now, does he include the national debt in that?"

EARNEST: "Well, what he, the president, has noted is that when you evaluate the deficit -- and the deficit has actually fallen by two-thirds since he's taken office -- and the way that we measure that is the way that economists evaluate it. They don't look at just the sum total. What they do is they evaluate the deficit as a percentage of the economy and that's a more effective and precise way to evaluate the impact of the deficit on our economy and by that measure the deficit has been -- has been brought down by two-thirds since the president took office."

KNOLLER: "What about the debt which has gone up 70 percent on his watch?"

EARNEST: "Yeah. Well, I don't know what the -- what the measure is of the debt as it relates to -- you know, when you measure it as a -- as a percentage of the -- of the economy, but I can tell you that the president continues to be committed to the kinds of fiscally responsible policies that were important to getting our deficit under control when the president first took office and that includes, as somebody mentioned little earlier, raising taxes on those at the top so that we can offer some tax cuts to the middle class that, while closing loopholes and making our tax cut a little bit more fair, we can also make it a little easier for middle-class families to make their ends meet and can do that in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the federal deficit."

KNOLLER: "While he concedes that debt is not a metric that shows we are better off?"

EARNEST: "Well, I think [he] concedes, as I would, that the wrong math shows that the debt has increased. But the steps that the president has taken have been important to improving our fiscal picture."

Video files
Full
Compact
Audio files
Full
Compact