re: #48 sngnsgt

As a Las Vegas resident, I agree 110% with Oscar:

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) - Mayor Oscar Goodman has refused an invitation to meet with President Obama when he arrives in town on Thursday. Mayor Goodman called President Obama a slow learner after he told Americans not to blow money on a weekend in Las Vegas if they were saving to put their kids through college.
Poll results say the same:

Yes 93%
No 6%
Undecided 1%

www.ktnv.com

The bolded part of that article doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me. While politically Obama made a mistake to even mention Vegas, the President wasn’t directing American’s to do anything. He was actually talking about his plans for dealing with the federal deficit and used a number of “conventional wisdom” American household budgeting anecdotes as metaphors for dealing with it.

From the transcript of the Nashua NH remarks:
whitehouse.gov

Now, finally, we should all be able to agree that we’ve got to do something about our long-term deficits. Now, these deficits won’t just burden our kids and our grandkids decades from now — they could damage our markets now, they could drive up our interest rates now, they could jeopardize our recovery right now.

Responsible families don’t do their budgets the way the federal government does. Right? When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. It’s time your government did the same. (Applause.)

Now, that’s why I continue to insist on making investments for job growth this year, why I continue to insist that we put more money into education; that’s why I say we put more money into science and technology for innovation. (Applause.) That’s why I continue to believe that we’ve got to invest in our infrastructure so that we are building the kind of America that can compete in the 21st century. Those are smart investments. That’s like buying the new boiler — if it’s busted, you got to get a new boiler. If the roof’s leaking, you got to fix the roof. There’s some things you’ve got to do.

But you can put off buying the new curtains, even if it’d be nice to have. You know, that — remodeling the bathroom, I mean, everything is working. You don’t need it right now. I mean, what we’ve been having are folks who want to buy the curtains but don’t want to fix the boiler. (Applause.) And our priorities have to change.

That’s why I proposed cutting more than 120 government programs — consolidating ones that are duplicative, reducing ones that are wasteful, eliminating those that just don’t work. (Applause.)