Charlie Rose Talks to Robert Rubin

What’s your assessment of the debt-ceiling deal that was just cut in Washington?
I think it was absolutely imperative we raise the debt limit. And we did. This was not the program that we should have had associated with raising the debt limit. I would have raised the debt limit as a clean increase, but that was not politically possible. I do not think this was the program that we needed. But there are a couple of things about this that are constructive. One is there are virtually no cuts in 2011 and 2012, so you’re not going to have any reduction—virtually no reduction—in demand from cuts during that period, which I think was very important. And secondly, although I think the focus was far too heavily on the discretionary part of the budget, at least it included both defense and non-defense. But fundamentally, we needed a very different program. We should be putting in place a serious deficit-reduction program of the kind that the Bowles-Simpson Commission outlined and that, actually, President Obama laid out in the middle of April. I think we could do ourselves an enormous amount of good on the jobs and growth front.

You’ve had some experience with Congress. Do you think this super committee will work?
What we should do now, and it directly relates to your question, is I think that we need to have a real public discussion about the consequences of our decisions. And what we need is far greater public understanding of what we need to do. And if the public understands the importance of putting in place a serious deficit-reduction program that defers its implementation date for a couple of years to try to give us time to get back on track, and also understands that we must have substantially increased revenues if we’re going to have the public investment that we need and the social safety net that the American people want, then we can put ourselves in a position where confidence can be substantially increased.