US President Barack Obama says with the US economy growing, but not fast enough, he would “keep on pushing” to keep America’s fragile recovery from global downturn on track.
“The economy is still growing, but it’s not growing as fast as it needs to. I’ve got things right now in — before Congress that we should move immediately,” he said in an interview with NBC Sunday.
There are “a whole host of measures we could take, no single element of which is a magic bullet but cumulatively can start continuing to build momentum for the recovery,” Obama said suggesting steps to help small businesses get credit and getting debt and deficits under control.
His comments came days after official figures showed US economic growth slowed to a pace of 1.6 per cent in the second quarter raising fears the fragile economy could slip back into a recession.
Obama said the sluggish economy combined with heavy debt will force “some very tough decisions” for his administration which had anticipated the slow down. “We anticipated that the recovery was slowing.”
However, it was important to balance the need to help the economy in the near term with ensuring the budget deficit does not explode in the future, he said.
The deficits resulted from the “incredibly deep recession,” Obama said. But “We’re going to be have to do two things at once. We’ve got to keep on pushing to grow the economy. But we’ve also on the medium term and the long term have to get control of our deficit,” Obama said.
“And it would be ideal where we didn’t have to worry about one and could just focus on the other. But, you know, this generation, it’s fallen on our shoulders to make some very tough decisions.”
With economy expected to be the key issue in the November mid-term poll to the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, Obama’s Demoratic party faces the prospect of losing its majority in the two chambers giving a major setback to his agenda of change.