about in the commentary about the entitlement reform and how it was handled on both sides. the president and the republican response with paul ryan from wisconsin. you know, the deficit commission in their recommendations, came up with this raising the retirement age to 68. by 2050. that would mean that my 4-year-old would be affected, but many folks who are heading toward retirement, or already there would never be effected by any of that. yet, that perspective is lost perhaps in this debate. well, the social security i think experts have almost unanimously agreed is the easier of the two big ones to deal with. because if you raise retirement age, and you limit the size of the cost of living increases, or the other steps of that kind, which would not effect current retirees at all, you can get through this. with social security. the problem is medicare.
most of the cuts in savings i propose only address annual domestic spending. which represents a little more than 12% of our budget. to make further progress, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough. it won t. [ applause ] the president: the bipartisan fiscal commission i created last year made this crystal clear. i don t agree with all their proposals. but they made important progress. their conclusion is that the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we taken it. in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending and spending through tax breaks and loopholes. [ applause ] the president: this means further reducing health care costs. including programs like
we reform agricultural subsidies, subsidies that sometimes pay large farms for crops they doept grow. we make modest adjustments to federal retirement programs. we reduce the billions that goes to fannie mae and freddie mac. we also ask the largest financial firms, companies saved during the financial crisis, to repay the american people for every dime we spent and we save an additional $1 trillion as we end the wars in iraq and afghanistan. these savings are not only counted as part of the plan, but as part of the budget plan that nearly every republican on the house voted for. finally, this plan includes structural reforms to reduce the cost of health care and programs like medicare and medicaid. keep in mind, we ve already included a number of reforms in the health care law. which will go a long way towards
controlling these kos, but we re going to have to do a little more. this plan reduces wasteful subsy d dis while changing some incentives that often lead to excessive health care costs. it makes prescriptions more affordable. we ll work with governors to make medicaid more efficient and accountable and we ll change the way we pay for health care. instead of just paying for procedures, providers will be paid more when they improve rumts. and such steps will save money and improve care. these changes are phased in slowly to strengthen medicare and medicaid over time because while we do need to reduce health care costs, i m not going to allow that to be an excuse that turns it into a voucher program. i m not going to stand for balancing the budget by reducing health care for poor children or
streams of tax amendments in the senate on all sorts of republican darlings, also democrats could try to load it up with their version of amendments on the tax side. so this kind of thing is very easy to bog down and p t is very easy it say, i m for infrastructure spending. that s the easy thing for elected officials to say. the question that will be facing them is how will you pay for it. and eric cantor would be happy it pay for some infrastructure spending with, oh, i don t know, a couple of hundred billion in medicare cuts. if they can get the democrats an president to go for some medicare cuts to pay for their infrastructure spending then they feel they will have neutralized the problem they have currently, the republicans do, on medicare. so it is all about the pay-for. the republicans will not come to an agreement on how to pay for this stuff. okay, reverend sharpton. your thoughts here. what do you think is here he is. the president of the united states.