US PRESIDENT Barack Obama yesterday used the first ever White House “virtual town hall” to press the case for his $3.6 trillion budget plan, reject a European-style public health system and oppose the legalisation of marijuana.
For almost 90 minutes, the president answered questions chosen by more than three million internet voters from more than 13,000 submitted online.
Mr Obama, who made unprecedented use of the internet as a fundraising and organisational tool during last year’s presidential campaign, said the forum was part of his effort to stay in touch with the American people.
“When I was running for president, I promised to open up the White House to the American people and this event, which is being streamed live over the internet, marks an important step towards achieving that goal.
“I’m looking forward to taking your questions and hearing your thoughts and concerns – because what matters to you and your families, and what people here in Washington are focused on, aren’t always one and the same thing.”
Most of the questions touched on education, healthcare and jobs, issues that allowed Mr Obama to promote his budget proposal, which is currently making its way through Congress. He said that, while the measure of his budget’s success would be in the jobs it created, the American economy had to be rebalanced to ensure long-term prosperity.
“So much of our economic activity was in the financial services sector. It was related to an overheated housing market. It was dependent on huge amounts of consumer saving. And we were seeing those steady declines in manufacturing. We were seeing steady declines in a lot of other productive sectors of the economy,” he said.
“And one of the things that my budget is designed to do is, by fixing our education system, by reducing costs of healthcare, by going after the clean-energy jobs of the future, trying to put our economy on a more solid footing.”
On taking office, Mr Obama promised to consider every option to make healthcare accessible to all Americans, more than 40 million of whom have no health coverage. “The problem is that we have what’s called a legacy, a set of institutions that aren’t that easily transformed,” he told yesterday’s forum.
“And so what evolved in America was an employer-based system. It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch. But that’s what everybody is accustomed to. It works for a lot of Americans. And so I don’t think the best way to fix our healthcare system is to suddenly completely scrap what everybody is accustomed to and the vast majority of people already have. Rather, what I think we should do is to build on the system that we have and fill some of these gaps.”
A number of the most popular questions were about marijuana but Mr Obama laughed off a question about whether legalising marijuana would help to improve the economy and create jobs.
“This was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”