Word: deficits
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Thanks to the California state budget that was approved early Thursday morning, my husband and I - relatively new citizens of the Golden State - will help bridge the extraordinary $42 billion deficit next year by paying approximately $1,000 in additional taxes, fees and loss of dependent tax credits. And this figure will remain at that level only if we make no purchases for 12 months in an effort to avoid the new 1-cent-on-the-dollar increase in sales...
...trade deficit with China reached an all-time high of $266 billion last year, prompting U.S. complaints of unfair trade practices by Beijing. Meanwhile China has bashed what it calls efforts by the U.S. to promote protectionism. As money from China's $586 billion stimulus program begins to flow, some economists expect that it will encourage export production faster than it stimulates domestic consumption. If that's the case, the Sino-U.S. trade gap and the resulting economic tensions will only swell...
...right. Orszag had been working the problem for months, leading a four-hour meeting on his birthday, Dec. 16, in Chicago, at which Obama showed up with a vanilla cake. Orszag, Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Orszag's deputy Robert Nabors agreed that there was no avoiding a deficit this year of about $1.5 trillion, including the bank bailout and the stimulus bill. They were prepared to swim even deeper into the red next year, expanding Obama's initiatives on renewable energy and high-speed rail lines and raising the deficit to 10% of gross domestic product, the highest...
...outlived their usefulness. Even as he signed the stimulus bill, he had already pivoted to the next message. "We will need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again," he said, "while at the same time recognizing that we have inherited a trillion-dollar deficit, and we need to begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding deficits over the long term...
...everyone knows that while eliminating earmarks and cutting fat sounds good and plays well, it cannot alone address the deficit problem when discretionary spending amounts to less than 40% of the total budget. The only chance Obama will have to build confidence in the economy, even as he digs a deeper deficit hole in the next two years, is to convince Americans and the world that he's laying the foundation for long-term budget control through entitlement reform and, in particular, curbing the cost of health care. Total U.S. health-care spending in 2007 rose to $2.2 trillion...