“..US Debt Tops $12 Trillion..” (40 cents from every tax dollar..’goes to service the debt’..)
“..At the end of his visit to China Wednesday, President Barack Obama warned that the US economy faces the threat of a “double-dip recession” ..
.. unless the government carries out fiscal austerity measures designed to slash the mounting public debt.
Obama’s remarks came just a day after the Treasury Department announced that the US public debt had passed the $12 trillion mark, a record high.
The debt has soared from $10 trillion in September 2008, at the outset of the world the financial meltdown.
The unprecedented rise reflects above all the massive deficit spending that the government has used to bail out Wall Street ..
.. and to assume responsibility for the bad debts of major banks and finance houses.
“Our first job was to get the economy to recover. And we’re seeing that,” Obama told Fox News in an interview conducted in Beijing.
He continued, “I think it is important, though, to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”
In reporting the remarks, the Financial Times noted pointedly that their timing, coming at the end of his three-day trip visit to China ..
.. raised the question of whether “his Chinese counterparts delivered stern warnings to Mr. Obama about the consequences of continuing high US budget deficit spending.”
China, which holds nearly $800 billion in US Treasury bonds, is the US economy’s biggest creditor.
As the Financial Times noted, “some presented his [Obama’s] state visit to China as that of a debtor visiting his banker.”
In a separate interview with NBC News, Obama defended his policy when asked whether he should have acted sooner on jobs, asserting that his administration’s policies had been designed “to make sure we didn’t slip into a Great Depression.”
Obama went on to qualify his boast about economic recovery, acknowledging that “people are really hurting right now” because of the unemployment crisis.
The only proposals that he raised for spurring employment growth, however, were providing corporations with a tax incentive to hire new workers and boosting US exports, which he cited as “an example of something we could do without spending money.”
The administration continues to rule out any direct job creation measures by the government itself..”
go to source/story>>As US Debt Tops $12 Trillion : Information Clearing House - ICH