DRUDGE REPORT– In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, host Steve Scully broke from a meek Washington press corps with probing questions for the new president.

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep
deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far.
This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our
failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last
several decades.

So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a
lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the
auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same
time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment
insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who
have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term
problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem.
And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce
long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of
the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too
expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We
can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health
care system that we’ve got now.

Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an
overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow
until essentially it consumes everything…

SCULLY: When you see GM though as “Government Motors,” you’re reaction?

OBAMA: Well, you know – look we are trying to help an auto industry
that is going through a combination of bad decision making over many
years and an unprecedented crisis or at least a crisis we haven’t seen
since the 1930’s. And you know the economy is going to bounce back and
we want to get out of the business of helping auto companies as quickly
as we can. I have got more enough to do without that. In the same way
that I want to get out of the business of helping banks, but we have to
make some strategic decisions about strategic industries…

SCULLY: States like California in desperate financial situation, will you be forced to bail out the states?

OBAMA: No. I think that what you’re seeing in states is that
anytime you got a severe recession like this, as I said before, their
demands on services are higher. So, they are sending more money out. At
the same time, they’re bringing less tax revenue in. And that’s a
painful adjustment, what we’re going end up seeing is lot of states
making very difficult choices there…

SCULLY: William Howard Taft served on the court after his presidency, would you have any interest in being on the Supreme Court?

OBAMA: You know, I am not sure that I could get through Senate confirmation. …
(05/23/09)
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Have we reached the bottom?

We would like to think so. This holiday
weekend most of us will gather to celebrate the beginning of summer
with our friends and family. Schools are letting out, some of our children have reached their milestones and are
graduating, vacations are are being planned. And, so the average modern
human would like to believe that soon things will return to “normal.”

Here “normal” is defined as the way things were prior to October 9th, 2007. Is this a valid belief? Is it reasonable to hope that things can return to the way they were?

Before we can answer those questions, we must first understand why the market crashed in the first place.

Why is this happening? What went wrong? What is really going on here? These are all good questions, but all have been poorly answered thus far. My answer is that our present Economic System is failing. It is obsolete. It cannot provide for the needs of 6.5 billion humans living on a finite planet with diminishing natural resources.

In synergic science our present economic system would be described as a PRODUCT Tensegrity. This is a Neutral (Money Based) Fair Market Help Exchange System. It depends on the exchange of money between buyers and sellers. This is the basis for our present Consumer Nation.

For this system to work certain conditions must exist. The population must be small compared to the available natural resources. In fact, it works best when we have relatively unlimited resources. This was the condition in America in the 1770s. The U.S. population was ~2.5 million people. Within the boundary of what is today America an enormous supply of land, water, wild animals, minerals, and petroleum existed. The PRODUCT Tensegrity is an enormously inefficient system. It creates products that no one needs, and even that no one buys. This is why 50% to 80% of new businesses fail in their first three years, even in the best of economic times.

Why have all of today’s leading business and economic
gurus failed to explain what is
really happening? The answer is because they are locked into the wrong
paradigm. They assume that help cannot be exchanged without money. They
cannot imagine a help exchange system that does not have buyers and
sellers.

For our lives to return to “normal” will require nothing less than the emergence of a radically new economy. It will be so different from our current economy that most of us will initially be startled by those differences. In 2001, I first proposed such a new mechanism for the human exchange of goods and services. This new mechanism was radically different from the way we do things today. Nothing really effects our lives more than the way we exchange goods and services.  In synergic science, this new help exchange system is called a GIFT Tensegrity or GIFTegrity for short.

You might choose to take some time this weekend to read my description of an alternative economy. It will help you to understand our present dilemma, and introduce you to a positive pathway out of our current crisis.

So have we reached the bottom?

No. If we continue our obsession with money, we have only begun our descent. If we are willing to consider a synergic alternative, then we can build a new system that works for everyone. (05/23/09)
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