Obama to Boehner: 'We Don't Have a Spending Problem'

Typical Libthink. Spending is never the problem, it's all about "revenue enhancement".

One of the reasons that President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner had difficulty agreeing to a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction and avoiding the "fiscal cliff" was that both men disagreed on the nature of the debt problem. Boehner believes that government spending is the problem while Obama believes the problem is the rising costs of health care, not government spending.

During those negotiations, Obama repeatedly told Boehner that "we don't have a spending problem," Boehner recalled in an interview with The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore.

A similar disagreement can be heard frequently on political talk shows. "We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem," Republicans repeat often. "We don't have a spending problem, we have a health care problem," Democrats often counter.