Restrict pay for all Senators and Congress to $75,000 for a period of 3 years to repay the National deficit.

Thanks for your petition about reducing the deficit. We completely agree that it's an important issue, and we'll talk about your broader point up front (and get to your specific request in a moment).

President Obama has worked to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion, and his policies have contributed to the fastest decline in our deficits since WWII

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects that by the end of the year, the deficit will drop to 4.2 percent of GDP, if the President’s budget were enacted. When the President came into office, that number stood at 10.1 percent. In four years, we've more than cut it in half.

We know the work on this front isn't complete: The President has a compromise proposal on the table to replace the sequester and further reduce the deficit and through a balanced approach.

As our economy continues to strengthen, we must not let self-inflicted wounds from Washington harm our progress. Unfortunately, earlier this year, Congress allowed a series of automatic budget cuts to fall across the federal government -- and now we're starting the see the results of this thing that folks in Washington call the sequester.

And because of these mindless cuts, there are kids who've been kicked out of Head Start programs whose parents are scrambling to find alternate solutions. There are seniors going without support from programs like Meals on Wheels. There are military communities struggling to make do with less.

Now you've proposed a pay cut for members of Congress -- limiting all of their salaries for three years. Lawmakers control their own paychecks (subject, of course, to the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), and it's up to them to choose to take a reduction. But because the sequester is forcing employees of the federal government to serve furloughs and take home less pay, President Obama is returning 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury Department this year in a show of solidarity.

To move us past the sequester altogether, the President has introduced a budget that replaces these dumb cuts with a set of smarter reductions that reduce the deficit by an additional $1.8 trillion on top of the more than $2.5 trillion we’ve already cut. It reforms the tax code to close a bunch of wasteful special interest loopholes and makes investments in things like education, research, and manufacturing -- all of which will create new jobs right now.

We're in complete agreement with the idea that Americans deserve better from their elected officials. We have a lot of work to do, and we can't keep lurching from crisis to crisis.

As the President said in the State of the Union, our North Star must be how to create good jobs and strengthen the middle class. That’s what he will continue to focus on every day.

Tell us what you think about this response and We the People.