There was no avoiding the fact that we were going to hit our debt ceiling.

America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for.

If we had decided on January 5, in the new House of Representatives, to make no new spending bills, the debt ceiling would've still been hit, because, those are bills that are coming in as a result of purchases and commitments made by the administration and the previous Congress.

The American people were really not 100% convinced that this idea of default was really going to occur, and I think the media, current company excepted here, did not help in that regard because they confused the American people about what default actually meant.