Stephen Foley: US economy: the clock is ticking for Mr Obama

Saturday, 29 August 2009

US Outlook: Members of the United States Congress do not always make it obvious on their websites which political party they are attached to, but there is a clue. If the website contains a "national debt clock," racing higher before your eyes, they are probably Republican.

The soaring US budget deficit, now expected to hit a record $1.58trillion this year, 11.2 per cent of GDP, is becoming a political problem for the Democratic President. Voters now put the deficit as their second biggest concern, and that's a large part of the reason why Barack Obama is encountering resistance to his universal healthcare plan.

Happily, the deficit is still trumped by the economy and the outlook for getting a job as a source of concern, but liberal politicians the world over need to push back aggressively against deficit hawks fanning the fears of their populations.

It was a relatively tiny revision to US economic forecasts this week that added $2trillion to the White House calculation of national borrowing over the next decade. A deeper, longer recession will keep tax revenues lower for longer, it said, and the national debt now looks like it will rise $9trillion over 10 years, not the $7trillion it predicted as recently as May.

The alarming headlines this revision generated only added to the calls for spending cuts or tax hikes to close the gap, fiscal responses that would choke off this nascent recovery. But the real lesson of the new predictions is that they are highly uncertain and hugely sensitive to the performance of the economy, and therefore stimulating the economy must remain the No 1 concern for the time being.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/busin ... 79008.html