C-SPAN’s Steve Scully Confuses ‘Deficit’ and ‘Debt’ in Obama Interview
I caught this on Drudge Report today. Seems like C-SPAN’s political analyst Steve Scully confused using ‘deficit’ and ‘debt’ in his interview with President Obama. Take a look of this screen shot off Drudge:
Here is the quote from Scully:
SCULLY: Yet, it all takes money. 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.
In this quote, Scully says ‘$1.7 trillion debt’ and ‘deficit of $11 trillion.’ However, we all know that this is wrong. We have a $1.7 trillion deficit for this year and a national debt of $11 trillion.
Is this mix-up significant? Probably not in the grand scheme of things. However, it does highlight the fact that a lot of people, even those that are well-informed, get ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ confused and while Scully most likely knows the difference between the two, the sad fact is I doubt the majority of Americans do.
To see the entire transcript of the C-SPAN interview, click here.
