The president said it again: Our problem is with Social Security and Medicare.

[jsr]

24. Here is a link to what he just said:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-oct-17-remarks-on-shutdown-deal/2013/10/17/3eff02b6-3738-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html

There's a lot of noise out there, and the pressure from the extremes affect how lot of members of Congress see the day-to-day work that's supposed to be done here...

Let me be specific about three places where I believe we can make progress right now.

First, in the coming days and weeks, we should sit down and pursue a balanced approach to a responsible budget, a budget that grows our economy faster and shrinks our long-term deficits further. At the beginning of this year, that's what both Democrats and Republicans committed to doing. Senate passed a budget. House passed a budget. They were supposed to come together and negotiate. And had one side not decided to pursue a strategy of brinksmanship, each side could have gotten together and figured out how do we shape a budget that provides certainty to businesses and people who rely on government, provides certainty to investors and our economy, and we'd be growing faster right now.

Now, the good news is the legislation I signed yesterday now requires Congress to do exactly that, what it could have been doing all along. And we shouldn't approach this process of creating a budget as an ideological exercise, just cutting for the sake of cutting. The issue's not growth versus fiscal responsibility. We need both. We need a budget that deals with the issues that most Americans are focused on, creating more good jobs that pay better wages.

And remember, the deficit is getting smaller, not bigger. It's going down faster than it has in the last 50 years. The challenge that we have right now are not short-term deficits; it's the long-term obligations that we have around things like Medicare and Social Security.