US President Barack Obama vowed on Monday that he will cut his country's budget deficit by 2013.
"Today, I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office," Obama declared, as he opened a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" at the White House.
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US President Barack Obama (R) speaks next to Vice President Joseph Biden at the U. Conference of Mayors in the East Room of the White House in Washington February 20, 2009.[Xinhua]? |
"This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we've long neglected," said the president. "But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay, and that means taken responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control."
Obama invited lawmakers, business figures and academics to the White House summit to address the nation's future financial health.
"If we confront this crisis without also confronting the deficits that help cause it, we risk sinking into another crisis down the road," said Obama at the summit.
"To start reducing these deficits, I have committed to going through our budget line by line to rout out waste and inefficiency, a process that Peter and our administration, our team, has already begun," said the president.
"And I'll soon be instructing each member of my Cabinet to go through every item in their budgets as well. And already we've seen how much money we can save, just in the last 30 days," he said.
Earlier Monday, Obama also declared that his administration would release 15 billion dollars of economic stimulus payments to help governors meet Medicaid payments to poor Americans.
"I think there are some very legitimate concerns on the part of some about the sustainability of expanding unemployment insurance. What hasn't been noted is that is 7 billion dollars of a 787 billion dollar program. And it's not even the majority of the expansion of unemployment insurance," Obama said when meeting with governors from most of the 50 US states.
"We are addressing the greatest economic crisis we have seen in decades by investing unprecedented amounts of the American people's hard-earned money," said the president. "With that comes an unprecedented obligation to do so wisely, free from politics and personal agendas."
"On this, I will not compromise or tolerate shortcuts," he warned.
Obama, who took the oath of office on January 20, is due to deliver the outline of his administration's first budget on Thursday for the 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1, 2009.
The budget will reflect big increases in government spending on public works that were part of the 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus plan that Obama signed into law on Tuesday.
US federal budget deficit soared to 569 billion dollars in the first four months of the current fiscal year, the highest on record for this period, the Treasury Department reported earlier this month.
The deficit for October 2008 through January 2009 was six times more than the red ink during the year-ago period and has already surpassed the imbalance for all of last year, which was 454.8 billion dollars, a full-year record.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that the budget deficit will hit an all-time high of 1.2 trillion dollars in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2009.
The estimate doesn't include the cost of Obama's economic stimulus bill.
Private economists expect the budget deficit for this current fiscal year to hit 1.6 trillion dollars.
In the 2007 fiscal year, the federal budget deficit dropped by 34.4 percent to 162 billion dollars, a five-year low since an imbalance of 159 billion dollars in 2002, reflecting faster growth in government revenues than spending.
The 2002 performance marked the first budget deficit after four consecutive years of budget surpluses.
(Xinhua News Agency February 24, 2009)