President Barack Obama said that he failed to cut the country’s deficit in half because he grossly misjudged the severity of the economic recession.
In an interview with Fox affiliate WAGA-TV in Atlanta, Obama explained:
"Well we're not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized," Obama said about his inability to cut the deficit in half.
"Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%. It turns it retracted close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year's span, about half a year before I took office and half a year after I took office," Obama said.
"So, the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn't understand at that point how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in, and it means that more people are getting unemployment insurance, we're helping states more so they don't teachers, etc. The key though is we're setting ourselves on a path where we can get our debt under control."