Washington — The deal reached by Congress to raise the debt ceiling and cut more than $2 trillion in public spending should have only a minor impact on the economy for the next two years.
Almost all the cuts would be made in 2014 or beyond. The approach heeds a warning by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and many private economists: Cutting too much too soon could harm the weak economic recovery.
Yet the deal won’t do much to help the economy, either, at least in the short term, economists said.
Under the debt deal, discretionary spending, which excludes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, would be cut $21 billion in 2012 and $42 billion in 2013, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
Combined, those cuts come to less than 1 percent of the nation’s $14 trillion economy. The impact “should be relatively minor,” says Brian Gardner, senior vice president at Keefe, Bruyette and Wood, an investment bank.
The spending cuts would increase to $75 billion in 2015 and $156 billion in 2021, the CBO estimates.
Overall, the first phase of cuts would reduce spending by $917 billion over 10 years. A congressional committee would decide on a second phase of cuts totaling $1.5 trillion.
Reduced government spending could mean less money for highway construction, housing assistance, government-sponsored scientific research or any number of other federal programs.
Companies that work on Defense Department contracts could suffer, too. The stocks of Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and Raytheon Co. all sank about 1 percent Monday.
If lawmakers fail to reach a deal on a second round of cuts, the Pentagon’s budget would be cut automatically by about $500 billion. That measure is designed as a threat, to make sure congressional negotiators have strong incentives to compromise.
Delaying the deepest cuts buys time for the economy to recover. Right now, it can’t absorb shocks very well: Unemployment is still 9.2 percent, people are spending less, worker pay has stagnated, and economic growth is the slowest since the end of the recession in June 2009.
Worries about the economy, including the weakest manufacturing in two years, were one reason the stock market couldn’t sustain a rally after the debt deal was struck. The market was flat Monday.
The Federal Reserve meets next week. Economists will watch for any signals that the Fed is considering new steps to help the economy, such as re-investing its government bond holdings indefinitely to keep interest rates down.
The debt deal could restore some confidence among individuals and businesses by removing the fear that the U.S. government would default on its debt for the first time, says Troy Davig, an economist at Barclays Capital.
Overall, the deal could subtract about 0.2 percentage point from economic growth in 2012, Davig estimates. While that is a relatively light blow, the economy only grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in April, May and June.
Comments
Richard Heckler 2 years, 7 months ago
That leaves time to do something truly substantial for the people:
The largest obstacles are fear of losing special interest campaign money, guts to terminate Bush tax cuts and backbone to cut off pork barrel corporate subsidies.
If all sides of the aisle were interested in a budget of substance that accomplishes all that matters there is only one budget on the table.
People's Budget = $4 trillion reduction
What the Peoples Budget does very specifically:
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=70§iontree=5,70
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/15/135435883/the-nation-obama-should-fight-for-peoples-budget
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/14/while_obama_touts_compromise_with_gop
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159939/fighting-peoples-budget
Richard Heckler 2 years, 7 months ago
The largest obstacles are fear of losing special interest campaign money, guts to terminate Bush tax cuts and backbone to cut off pork barrel corporate subsidies.
The remedy list:
One answer to problems such as this: CUT OFF special interest financing of elections! YES even at the local level.
Our government is always claiming the USA is about democracy. In that case allow the citizens to practice democracy by allowing citizens to vote in these measures come 2012:
Let's demand a new system and vote in Fair Vote America : http://www.fairvote.org/irv/ Demand a change on the next ballot.
Let's have public financing of campaigns. Citizens cannot afford special interest money campaigns for it is the citizens that get left out. Let citizens vote on this issue. http://www.publicampaign.org/
Bribery of elected officials is the most stinky of all bribery!
Fossick 2 years, 7 months ago
I read somewhere that the people's budget never burns the toast or suffers from gout. It never drops an SBD in the car when it's too hot outside to roll down the windows. It does not spread diarrhea, pyorrhea, or gonorrhea. It allows the growth of only perfectly-proportioned roses and sunflowers. Is this accurate?
gl0ck0wn3r 2 years, 7 months ago
Swedish death metal is way better than the people's buttjet!
Swedish death metal is a death metal music scene developed in Sweden. Many Swedish death metal bands are associated with the melodic death metal movement, thus giving Swedish death metal a different sound from other variations of death metal. Unlike American death metal groups, the first Swedish bands were rooted in punk rock. While Norway is more notorious for its quantity of black metal, Gothenburg in Sweden has a large melodic death metal scene, while Stockholm is notorious for its rawer death metal scene.
Unlike American groups, the Swedish death metal scene's earliest originators were influenced by punk rock, especially the D-beat hardcore punk scene.] Bathory, who would subsequently become a primary influence for the black metal scene, were a pivotal group in Swedish extreme metal.
In the early 1990s two death metal scenes emerged in Gothenburg and Stockholm. The first wave of "Swedish death metal" consisted of the bands Carnage and Nihilist, who fragmented later into Entombed, Dismember and Unleashed. Many of these bands used the trademark Tomas Skogsberg/Sunlight Studios "buzzsaw" guitar tone. It was created by using heavily detuned electric guitars (usually C# standard or lower), a maxed out Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal pedal, sometimes in combination with a single guitar through a Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal. The originator of this guitar sound was Nihilist guitarrist Leffe Cuzner though it was evolved and altered over the years. Newer bands playing in the 'old school' Swedish style are Bloodbath, Repugnant, and Paganizer; among others
Flap Doodle 2 years, 7 months ago
Forget THE people's BUDGET!!! Read the PEOPLE's cube!!!!! It = waaaay more truthful!!!! NOT reading THE people's CUBE = dumb and irresponsible and planet killing ! http://thepeoplescube.com/
grammaddy 2 years, 7 months ago
How about the ones who get to write off corporate jets. Or the American companies who pay more than 1/2 their payroll overseas. Or the oil companies.Or....
Fossick 2 years, 7 months ago
"Almost all the cuts would be made in 2014 or beyond" is a nice way of saying that none of the cuts will be made. Therefore all the conniption-throwing progs screaming about how this bill guts x or y can rest easy. $2.7 trillion in imaginary cuts is no different than the 'clean raise' that Obama wanted.
Kontum1972 2 years, 7 months ago
2014..LoL...we will all be in alien death camps....LoL!
Ron Holzwarth 2 years, 7 months ago
"the end of the recession in June 2009."
I'm not an expert, so I don't know anything. But someone told me that if you use the price of gold as a measure instead of using the very useful accounting trick of considering the dollar to be a constant value, the recession did not "end" in "June 2009". Instead, it is still continuing, and by some definitions, it is now a depression. .
The gist of that person's argument is that inflation is actually running at about 9% to 10% per year, because he considers the constantly rising price of gold, food, and fuel to be a very good measure of it.
But, the price of gold, food, and fuel are not considered at all in calculating the Consumer's Price Index (CPI), which is what the government's official claim of what the inflation of the dollar is. It is referred to as "core inflation". The Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) is determined by the "core inflation" every year for Social Security recipients.
But the constantly rising price of food and medications is the largest concern of most Social Security recipients. And they are not counted at all.
It was only what, three or four years since I heard radio advertisements urging listeners to buy gold right now at about $800 an ounce, because some experts believed that it would hit $1,000 an ounce in the relatively near future.
The price of gold is now over $1,600 an ounce.
just_another_bozo_on_this_bus 2 years, 7 months ago
I suppose that if the economy completely collapses, it'd be better to have gold than to not have gold.
But bottom-line is that even if you have mounds of gold, if the economic house of cards goes down, you're still screwed.
And re-adopting the gold standard over fiat money would just replace one set of anomalies with another set. It probably would restrain government spending somewhat, but 10% unemployment, or even much higher, would become the norm, boom and bust cycles would be more frequent and likely just as severe, and the average person would find it very difficult to borrow money at anything but extremely high interest rates, making it very difficult for small businesses to become established or to expand.
Commenting has been disabled for this item.