TIMESONLINE: The US economic crisis will deepen next year, Barack Obama warned the country yesterday when he announced the first details of a stimulus package that could ultimately exceed $1 trillion.
The President-elect, giving the most extensive interview since winning the election a month ago, spoke the day after he announced the biggest public works construction programme since Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system half a century ago.
In saying twice that “things are going to get worse before they get better”, Mr Obama was not simply reflecting the realities of the stricken US economy but seeking to gain political advantage from the financial crisis.
By talking up the scale of the recession, the President-elect was lowering expectations for what he can achieve next year while seeking to justify what will, in effect, be the greatest injection of federal money into the US economy since the Depression-era New Deal.
The economic crisis is so great that Mr Obama and his economic team now believe that nothing less than a giant stimulus package is needed. The depth of the worsening recession has presented him with an extraordinary mandate to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem – an opportunity that he did not have even a few weeks ago – and with it the chance to fund much of his hugely expensive legislative agenda.
The economic conditions – combined with a Democratic-controlled Congress – mean that Mr Obama is perhaps the most powerful incoming President, in terms of the ability to pass legislation quickly, since Lyndon Johnson took office in 1963. Barack Obama Reveals Stimulus Package that Could Exceed $1 Trillion >>> Tim Reid in Washington | December 8, 2008
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