Otro tema, porque lo de Redrado me tiene aburrido,.
Una opinión (resumida) en Economist:
... Barack Obama will announce a three-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending in his state-of-the-union message tomorrow. The president wants to show that he is serious about reducing the budget deficit. The freeze will limit total non-security discretionary spending (about 1/8 of the federal budget) to $447 billion a year through 2013, says the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery. It's supposed to save $250 billion through 2020.- ....
The sources of America's huge budget deficits are as follows. First, our taxes are too low for the spending we've come to expect. The 2009 deficit ran to $1.4 trillion; $231 billion of that resulted from the tax cuts passed during George Bush's administration, and another $218 billion came from increased interest payments on federal debt due to running deficits in the mid-2000s when we should have been running surpluses. ...
Second, we're in the midst of a vicious recession. Federal individual tax revenues dropped 22% in 2009; corporate tax receipts fell 57%.
Third, we're doing $787 billion in stimulus spending to counteract the recession, and we spent uncertain billions last year on various bail-outs to keep the financial system from collapsing. There's not much we can do about that.
Fourth, we spend too much on the military. ...
In CBO’s estimation, carrying out the Department of Defense's (DoD’s) 2009 plans for 2010 and beyond—excluding overseas contingency operations (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some much smaller military actions elsewhere)—would require defense resources averaging at least $573 billion annually (in 2010 dollars) from 2011 to 2028... The projection also exceeds the peak of about $500 billion (in 2010 dollars) during the height of the Reagan Administration’s military buildup in the mid-1980s.
Finally, we have the real long-term source of growth in America's national debt. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the US Government Accountability Office. (para el que tenga curiosidad y paciencia:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10137sp.pdf
The reason to be scared about America's long-term deficit outlook is because of health-care costs. If America does not get health-care cost inflation under control, Medicare and Medicaid will bankrupt the government. But an attempt to reform the health-care sector (one that proposed $500 billion in Medicare cuts and a cap on the employer health insurance tax exclusion) has all but destroyed Barack Obama's presidency. So he is instead going to announce an inconsequential discretionary spending freeze and hope it gets him enough political traction to give health-care reform another go. Let's hope it works.
El speech de Obama mañana va a tener consecuencias. Por lo expuesto y por lo que diga respecto al sistema bancario.-
Saludos
