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President Obama: We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some
more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently. (Applause.)
Not every government program works the way it’s supposed to. And frankly, government
can’t solve every problem. If somebody doesn’t want to be helped, government can’t always
help them. Parents -- we can put more money into schools, but if your kids don’t want
to learn it’s hard to teach them. (Applause.)
But you know what, I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy
to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them. So I’m going
to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of
cuts. We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy
to pay a little bit more. (Applause.) And, by the way, we’ve tried that before -- a
guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into
a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires.
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to
give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you
didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck
by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart
people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you
something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great
teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system
that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve
got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet
didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all
the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative,
but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires,
we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That
would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are
some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we
created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover
Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We
rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m
running for President -- because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re
in this together. (Applause.)