Barack Obama shrugs, but the debt keeps mounting

A fiscal horror is unfolding on the president’s watch, yet few seem concerned , writes Jeff Randall

By Jeff Randall

7:03AM BST 24 Sep 2012

 

For those of us who admire the United States and are hoping it will rediscover economic virtue and the road to recovery, last week was particularly unsettling. Both sides in the fight for the White House displayed an ignorance of fiscal issues more usually associated with contestants in a pub quiz. It was intriguing, however, that while Mitt Romney’s blunder made headlines across the globe, Barack Obama’s seemed not to disturb America’s mainstream media and went largely unreported beyond the US. The difference was that, whereas Mitt Romney impugned the integrity of millions of fellow citizens, dismissing 47 per cent of them as scroungers, the president merely insulted the nation’s collective intelligence – and almost no one seemed to care.

Romney’s observation was ridiculous: his group of alleged entitlement junkies includes pensioners, students, the disabled, many serving in the military and those on incomes too low to be taxed. For this, he was rightly pasted. By contrast, aside from the opprobrium of professional budget-watchers and diehard opponents, the man in charge of the world’s biggest economy emerged virtually unscathed from his casual confession on CBS that he did not know how much the US owes. It was a triumph of style over substance.

Asked by David Letterman on The Late Show to explain all those zeros on America’s debt clock, displayed at the Republicans’ convention, Obama replied: “I don’t remember what the number was, precisely.” Offering the president a clue, the veteran chat-show host suggested “about $10 trillion”, at which point Obama switched effortlessly to praising the budget surplus of Bill Clinton and sailed off to safety. It’s not as though America’s debt is a minor twinkle in a constellation of more serious problems. But not only was the president unable to recall the big number, he readily – perhaps deliberately – conflated the debt and the deficit.

For the record, US debt hit $5 trillion under Clinton, even though, to his credit, the 1999 federal budget was $76 billion in surplus. Not since Andrew Jackson, in 1835, has America been debt-free. A cynical man might conclude that Mr Obama knew all these details, but found dissembling a more convenient route out of trouble than discussing the fiscal horror that has unfolded on his watch.

The White House website boldly claims: “President Obama has led the way on structuring the government to live within its means.” This is not even remotely true. By any measure, the US continues to spend way above its income and, as a result, its debt position is deteriorating apace.