By msnbc.com staff
After his “halftime, America” Super Bowl ad, in which he urges the nation to follow in Detroit’s footsteps in rising from the recession, movie actor and director Clint Eastwood appeared on CNBC Friday to discuss another big issue he thinks the country needs to focus on right now: cutting spending.
“The last couple of regimes have been putting us deep in the hole,” Eastwood said.
“It’s such a basic thing,” he continued. “Your parents always tell you … when you don’t have a dollar in your pocket, you don’t spend two dollars. And that’s a basic philosophy of life. People think you can just put if off. If you put it off you just print more money, and the money in your pocket becomes devalued, and it’s not worth as much, and eventually it comes down to zero.”
Eastwood also weighed in on the Simpson-Bowles debate, saying he was “amazed” that President Obama ignored the recommendations of the co-chairs of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission: former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.
“They came back with a recommendation, which was to exactly stop spending, and then everyone said that’s enough from you guys, go home,” Eastwood said. “I thought, that’s a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of effort from everybody, and not very spirited for the country. I think both those gentlemen are smart and worth listing to, if you’ve gone ahead and assigned them to this project.”
Eastwood appeared in a Chrysler ad that aired during the Super Bowl last weekend.
“How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And how do we win?” Eastwood asks in the commercial, adding that “Detroit is showing us it can be done, and what’s true about them is true about all of us.”
