BUSH: Well, I think the national debt affects everybody.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: You personally.
BUSH: Obviously it has a lot to do with interest rates --
SIMPSON: She's saying, "you personally"
AUDIENCE QUESTION: You, on a personal basis -- how has it affected you?
SIMPSON: Has it affected you personally?
BUSH: I'm sure it has. I love my grandchildren --
AUDIENCE QUESTION: How?
BUSH: I want to think that they're going to be able to afford an education. I think that that's an important part of being a parent. If the question -- maybe I -- get it wrong. Are you suggesting that if somebody has means that the national debt doesn't affect them?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: What I'm saying is --
BUSH: I'm not sure I get -- help me with the question and I'll try to answer it.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, I've had friends that have been laid off from jobs.
BUSH: Yeah.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I know people who cannot afford to pay the mortgage on their homes, their car payment. I have personal problems with the national debt. But how has it affected you and if you have no experience in it, how can you help us, if you don't know what we're feeling?
SIMPSON: I think she means more the recession -- the economic problems today the country faces rather than the deficit.
BUSH: Well, listen, you ought to be in the White House for a day and hear what I hear and see what I see and read the mail I read and touch the people that I touch from time to time. I was in the Lomax AME Church. It's a black church just outside of Washington, D.C. And I read in the bulletin about teenage pregnancies, about the difficulties that families are having to make ends meet. I talk to parents. I mean, you've got to care. Everybody cares if people aren't doing well.
But I don't think it's fair to say, you haven't had cancer. Therefore, you don't know what's it like. I don't think it's fair to say, you know, whatever it is, that if you haven't been hit by it personally. But everybody's affected by the debt because of the tremendous interest that goes into paying on that debt everything's more expensive. Everything comes out of your pocket and my pocket. So it's that.
But I think in terms of the recession, of course you feel it when you're president of the U.S. And that's why I'm trying to do something about it by stimulating the export, vesting more, better education systems.