conclude that he s not looking to moderate. he s not looking to move to the middle. he is looking to go further to the left, and he wants to fight us every step of the way politically. and i don t think that s good for anybody in this country. it s reminiscent, isn t it, of a lot of republican leaders after his first inauguration getting together and trying to make him a one-term president? no. i see it as we have big problems we need to fix. we want to be a part of that solution. whether people like it or not or intend it or not, we more or less had the status quo election. we have a divided government. we have to make it work. when we see our country living far beyond its means, when we see our nation destroying our children s future by saddling them with a debt they can t handle, we have to do something about that. when we see families struggling in this economy, we have to do things to grow this economy. and the things that are coming out of washington right now don t do that.
they play a lot of politics. but the president is playing politics too. when i talked to the president six months ago about medicare, he said the spending trajectory is untenable. and so he knows there needs to be a fix in this area. and what s the shame in all of this is that they can t kind of sit down and work it out, because, you know, if you were the negotiator up at camp david, you d be able to do it. well, one of the problems is they re not at camp david. they are not sitting down together. but the state of the union i think should not be viewed as rather the inaugural address should not be viewed as a state of the union speech. this is not the place where he was laying it out. i m told by white house officials that he put on the table for medicare is still on the table. he wants to negotiate it. and i think paul ryan will be leading the republican side on where they go on this. there are going to be serious negotiations. they have to get down to it.
more and more able-bodied people are becoming dependent upon the government than upon themselves for their livelihoods. we want to make sure we don t continue that trend. and when you take a look at those statistics, it s not as bad as those statistics say. people want lives of upper mobility. people want to chart their own course. they want to reach their potential. and our policies should be geared toward doing that. so no one is suggesting that medicare and social security makes you a taker. these are people like my mom, who worked hard, paid her taxes, and now is collecting the benefit that she paid for. no one is suggesting that people like my mom is a taker. but you re citing figures that of course include entitlement reforms like social security. when these statistics get cited, it leads you to think that america is gone, that we re becoming too much of a dependent culture. my point has always been, that s not the whole picture. here is the criticism against you. and it wa
six months ago about medicare, he said the spending trajectory is untenable. and so he knows there needs to be a fix in this area. and what s the shame in all of this is that they can t kind of sit down and work it out, because, you know, if you were the negotiator up at camp david, you d be able to do it. well, one of the problems is they re not at camp david. they are not sitting down together. but the state of the union i think should not be viewed as rather the inaugural address should not be viewed as a state of the union speech. this is not the place where he was laying it out. i m told by white house officials that he put on the table for medicare is still on the table. he wants to negotiate it. and i think paul ryan will be leading the republican side on where they go on this. there are going to be serious negotiations. they have to get down to it. i think where the liberal or progressive mission was from the inaugural speech was on human
spending during the fiscal cliff negotiations. he didn t get that. they haven t put out a plan. the reason we wanted the debt limit extended was to showcase our budget. we will put a budget up that says here is our plan for economic growth and balancing the budget, entitlement reform which is necessary to save medicare from bankruptcy and get this debt under control. the president hasn t offered any of those kinds of plans in public. they tried to do back room deals, but those seem to fall apart. we want to debate it in public to contrast these visions. i want to keep up with some terms you re using here. you say the president wants to raise tax rates. a lot of the democrats i talked to and even the white house said they are willing to do tax reform where there could be additional revenue. are you opposed to any additional revenue that could come from tax reform? we offered that back in the fiscal cliff negotiations. the president got his additional revenues. that s behind us. thos