Barack Obama:
Full text: Obama remarks on debt ceiling deal - FT.com: The first part of this agreement will cut about $1 trillion in spending over the next 10 years -- cuts that both parties had agreed to early on in this process. The result would be the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was President –but at a level that still allows us to make job-creating investments in things like education and research. We also made sure that these cuts wouldn’t happen so abruptly that they’d be a drag on a fragile economy…
At the moment fiscal policy is already a "drag on a fragile economy": fiscal contraction is shrinking annual GDP growth by 1 percentage point without corresponding monetary ease. The most Obama can correctly claim is that he has not just raised this drag on a fragile economy by very much.
But if the Supercongress's recommendations are not adopted, that is just what he has done.
You would have thought that last week's GDP number would have caused some rethinking in the White House. But no.
