Barack Obama raised the specter of food safety inspections falling by the wayside and young people being denied college scholarships if the debt ceiling isn’t raised and the government exhausts its borrowing authority at a White House press conference today.

He continued his cat-and-mouse game with supporting gay marriage, calling New York’s marriage equality law “a good thing” even as he has continued to decline to “make news on the subject.”

Taking a different tack than he had previously, the president pointedly jabbed Congress for failing to do its part to help create jobs, whether by passing an extension of the payroll tax cut initiated last winter or a bill to provide loans for local businesses to hire workers for road and bridge repair.

Playing pundit, he said the Republican position to protect tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires, and corporate jet-owners in the fight over finding new sources of revenue for a deficit-reducing deal on raising the debt ceiling was not a “sustainable position,” suggesting the GOP in Congress would pay a hefty political price if it continued to refuse to meet Democrats–and the country at large–in the middle on the issue.