Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Political Punch by Jake Tapper:

MOSCOW – The day after he heralded a successful preliminary nuclear disarmament treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, President Obama today told ABC News in an interview:

“There’s Nothing That We Would Have Done Differently” on the Economy

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.”

Infrastructure projects were always going to take “six months to eight months to get that money actually into the ground because that’s the nature of big infrastructure projects,” he said.

In Singapore over night, White House economic adviser Laura D’Andrea Tyson said that “we should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus.” Would the president support a second stimulus package, as some congressional Democrats have proposed?

“The question that some have argued is, ‘Okay, what next?’ Maybe you stop the freefall but you still have close to 10% unemployment,’” the president said. “And you know, this is something that we wrestle with constantly.”

The challenge, the president said, is “that we inherited a big deficit, and it is at a certain point potentially counterproductive if we’re spending more money than we’re having to borrow.”

The president said supporters such as Gen. Colin Powell (Ret.) and billionaire investor Warren Buffet, who have said they’re worried about the massive deficits the Obama administration is creating, have “legitimate concerns. In the midterm and long term we’re going to have to get control of that.”

Working on short term stimulus “is one that where we’re pressing the gas, pressing the brakes, trying to get it right,” he said.