Obama On Economy: "There's Nothing That We Would Have Done Differently"
ABC News: Turning to domestic issues, the president said that when Vice President Joe Biden recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that the White House “misread” the economy when planning the stimulus package in January, the president said that “what Vice President Biden was referring to was simply the fact that when we passed he stimulus, we hadn’t gotten the full report of the first quarter contractions in the economy that turned out to be way worse than anybody had anticipated.”
But the president denied that his economic prescription was wrong because the diagnosis was incomplete.
“There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he said. “We needed a stimulus and we needed a substantial stimulus.”
Even with an economic assessment that was, in retrospect, overly optimistic, the president said his team knew “there was an economic tsunami coming at us, and we still knew that we were going to need a substantial stimulus,” one that would include “tax cuts which you can get out really fast” and “money to states so they’re not laying off teachers and firefighters, and police officers at such a rapid pace.”
