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I say, You know what, I know we need the money, and I’m gonna pay it, I’m just not paying you today, and we’ll pay you with interest, but we need to do a major reset and look at us internally, and say we can’t afford this …

… And so they say that would rock the market, capital would leave, the stock market would crash, interest rates would go up. I said, “Let me give you my feeling: Interest rates are gonna go up anyways. They went up the last time they raised the debt ceiling, interest rates went up … because we’re not dealing with the problem. We’re putting another Tylenol to the problem. And that’s not [an ad] for Tylenol.” So let’s just address the problem, and I think if we address it, I think the creditors that we owe money to around the world would say, “you know what, they’re getting their house in order.” And I think our credit rating would do better, if we did that than face the mass [sic] program we’ve been up to … There are several of us that we’re not raising the debt ceiling; don’t ask us. We don’t have a money problem, we have a spending problem.

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- The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics.

- More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.

- Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government's debt dynamics any time soon."[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_%26_Poor%27s

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