limit. the treasury is firing back, accusing the agency of basing its decision on a $2 trillion error. couldn t get any bigger than that, right? chief washington correspondent john harwood is live at the white house for us. john, with a good morning to you. okay. treasury department s got their dukes up. they didn t take this lying down. they re taking issue with all the calculations that led to this? what they re saying is that standard & poor s in assessing the cost of u.s. discretionary spending overstated it by $2 trillion because of a confusion about which baseline. it s sort of a bunch of accounting mumbo jumbo, but the bottom line is they said they got their numbers wrong. instead of avoiding the downgrade, standard & poor s pointed to politics basically said the u.s. political system is dysfunctional. in defense of standard & poor s president obama has made the same point. he said our problem isn t that our credit isn t aaa. but our political system isn t aaa. standard & poor
recession quickly in the late spring and came back out of it. to a certain extent, this is a judgment call comong economists. annie, thanks for breaking it down for us. republican presidential candidates are placing the blame for the downgrade squarely on president obama s shoulders. president obama has destroyed the credit rating of the united states through his failed economic policies and his inability to control government spending by raising the debt ceiling. it s a reflection of the failed leadership of president obama. he really is inept when it comes to the economy. now, gop candidate jon huntsman blamed the downgrade on out of control spending and a lack of leadership in washington. he says for far tore long we have let reckless government spending go unchecked and the cancer russ debt affecting our nation has spread. what worries you most about the credit downgrade? my handle is @alex witt.
standard & poor s has taken the u.s. down a notch after the long debt fight in washington. standard & poor s considers canada, france, and the uk more credit worthy than the u.s. our credit rating is on par new zealand and belgium. the downgrade comes on the heels of the newest jobs report showing the unemployment rate dropping slightly. the economy did add 117,000 jobs in july, but not enough to convince standard & poor s the u.s. is moving in the right direction. our job right now has to be doing whatever we can to help folks find work, to help create the climate where business can put up that job listing, where incomes are rising again for people. we were right to hold the president accountable on the debt limit because he s already back to proposing more stimulus spending, higher taxes and even more regulations. doubling down on the same failed policies is not the answer.
down that one notch. when s&p and some of the others threatened to put us on a negative watch, if we had had that discussion then, i would have said a couple weeks ago, this is a silly discussion. there s a pin prick of reason in this. we have prominent republicans, mitch mcconnell, representative paul ryan, some of the most prominent republicans are saying from now on, what just happened with the debt ceiling should be a template for every other debt ceiling increase we have. and that we should have a dollar for dollar rule, every dollar of debt ceiling increase means a dollar of spending cuts. they want to enshrine this functionality in our system. i can see where s&p would really raise an eyebrow. now, we are still a completely reliable borrower, the united states government, and so the downgrade was wrong. the math was ridiculous, all that. but that one point maintains. historically, when we ve had
it s in daily beast and newsweek. thank you for writing it and coming on us w us. you re welcome, alex. we have yet to hear from the white house about the s&p credit rating downgrade, but we ll have more on the potential impact this downgrade may have on the economy and the battle for the white house as well as your wallets. stay with us because you re watching msnbc saturday. discover customersl are getting five percent cashback bonus at the pump. and at many of the places their summer plans take them.