Word: fiscal
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...reality was more complicated. Greece now had a solid currency--but it wasn't Greece's currency. The euro was managed by monetary wonks at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt for whom the Greek economy was but a blip. And the decision makers in Athens with responsibility for fiscal policy continued to blunder. The country kept running big deficits in the boom years. Then came the Great Recession. Last fall, a new government revealed that the 2009 budget deficit was much higher than previously disclosed--nearly 13% of GDP. Ever since, the world's financial markets have been going...
Three other nations on the fringe of the euro zone--Portugal, Ireland and Spain--are caught in the undertow of Greece's crisis. All three have displayed better fiscal behavior than Greece, but they suffer from the same disconnect between their dire local economic conditions and the monetary policymakers in Frankfurt with other things on their minds. Meanwhile, a core euro-zone country, Italy, has also fallen out of favor with investors because of its high government debt. In a sure sign that these troubles are serious, market analysts have assigned them a catchy acronym: PIGS, for Portugal, Ireland, Greece...
...budget for the 2011 fiscal year that President Obama unveiled Feb. 1 lays out a depressing picture of this country’s future. Deficits will rise to a long-term level at which they will cease to be sustainable, and unemployment will stay high for many years. Our country is on pace to follow Japan down a path of aging and debt-ridden decay, and there seem to be few good solutions on the horizon. The conventional wisdom says that after years of spending without any awareness of our limits, we must now enter an extended period...
...such spending proposals does not allow us to ignore our deficit. Our excessive borrowing is a serious, long-term problem and should be dealt with by focusing on the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Social Security instead of curbing domestic outlays that are necessary for economic recovery. But any fiscal reforms will be useless if they are implemented in a country that is permanently weakened by the loss of an entire generation destroyed by the specter of unemployment. In the short term, the government must spend aggressively to make sure that millions are not left without jobs, education, and futures...
Perhaps this isn't surprising. With the economy shaken and unemployment sky-high, with the federal debt mounting by the trillion as Washington politicians pay lip service to fiscal responsibility (picture a sermon on humility delivered by Shaquille O'Neal), an outbreak of outrage was inevitable. The Tea Party movement is just one expression of a vast discontent unsettling the country. Recent polls have found that two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as dissatisfied or angry with their government - a huge, not-so-silent majority that ranges from conservatives convinced that Obama is a Maoist to liberals convinced that...