What I desire to point out is that I wish the law was not so, but that being the law, I must follow it.

If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy.

The very first email I got [was] from a women's group saying 'We don't want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.'

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output.

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.