Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-pledges-to-halve-deficit-asks-governors-to-spend-stimulus-responsibly Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript President Obama pledged today to halve the $1.3 trillion deficit by the end of his first term and spoke to Governors at a summit, urging them to use the federal stimulus money responsibly in their states. Kwame Holman reports. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GWEN IFILL: President Obama once again spent the bulk of the day focusing on economic issues, speaking to the nation's governors about spending, and then presiding over an unusual bipartisan White House summit on fiscal responsibility. NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman has more. KWAME HOLMAN: Today's fiscal responsibility summit was the first step in a weeklong effort by the president to put the focus on the nation's budget deficit.BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation. KWAME HOLMAN: Mr. Obama told participants, which included lawmakers from both parties, as well as leaders of community organizations, he will cut the $1.3 trillion deficit in half by 2013.Savings were expected to come in part from a winding down of the war in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire in 2011.The president said his budget will account for costs associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, natural disasters, and the yearly fix of the alternative minimum tax, items routinely left out of past budgets by the Bush administration. BARACK OBAMA: For too long our budget process in Washington has been an exercise in deception, a series of accounting tricks to hide the extent of our spending and the shortfalls in our revenue, and hope that the American people won't notice.Budgeting certain expenditures for just one year when we know we'll incur them every year for five or ten, budgeting zero dollars for the Iraq war — zero — for future years, even when we knew the war would continue, budgeting no money for natural disasters, as if we would ever go 12 months without a single flood, fire, hurricane or earthquake.We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend. In order to address our fiscal crisis, we're going to have to be candid about its scope.And that's why the budget I will introduce later this week will look ahead 10 years and will include a full and honest accounting of the money we plan to spend and the deficits we will likely incur.