“The problem that I’ve seen in the debate that’s been taking place and in some of these tea-party events is I think they’re misidentifying, sort of, who the culprits are here. As I said before, we had to take some emergency steps last year, but the majority of economists will tell you that the emergency steps we take are not the problem long-term. The problem, long-term, are the problems I talked about earlier. We’ve had two tax cuts that weren’t paid for, two wars that weren’t paid for, we’ve got a population that’s getting older, we’re all demanding services, but our taxes have actually, substantially, gone down. And so the challenge, I think, for the tea-party movement, is to identify specifically, ‘What would you do?’” Barack Obama speaking at a televised town-hall event on CNBC this morning.
