A year ago, it seemed that America had finally elected a president who decided to stop trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of dollars of taxpayers money at it, and instead started throwing trillions of dollars of taxpayers money at everything, whether problematic or not. Even more worringly, as well as spending taxpayers dollars like there’s no tomorrow, several hundred billion dollars of foreign (mostly Chinese) debt is also being spent on political, voter-appeasing schemes, most of which promise no long-term growth. This massive borrowing requirement is due to the US fiscal deficit currently standing at about 10% of GNP – the same percentage of Americans who are still unemployed.
President Obama’s latest announcement to freeze spending on roughly one-sixth of the federal budget for three years is therefore made no less welcome by its inevitability. The question remains as to how it will be greeted by the public. An electorate tends to be unforgiving, and the fact that Obama’s promises of simply spending his way out of recession were quite obviously economically unviable, if not impossible, is unlikely to prove an acceptable excuse to a country that’s still waiting for the return to growth that their President’s “Yes we can” attitude promised.
An electorate that believed whatever the cool new optimistic guy told them, and didn’t wonder why no other developed country was rushing to employ his foolproof ‘stimulus package’ route to recovery, deserves to have to put up with the short-sighted policy that involves telling voters what they want to hear, and then desperately jumping ship one year in when said policy proves to be entirely unsustainable. For this reason, this commentator has little sympathy for the disillusioned American voter.
