Posted on 05/10/2009 7:55:40 PM PDT by neverdem
While the Obama administration has frankly admitted the scale of America's financial problems, the British people are not being told the truth, says George Osborne.
It is a tale of two cities. I have left behind a London stuck in a wasted year as a tired and embittered government desperately limps towards its electoral fate; and I have come to a Washington DC buzzing with the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of a new administration.
I am here to talk to the senior members of the Obama economic team. When I congratulated one of them on surviving the first 100 days, he replied: "Survived? I think we have done a lot better than that." That self-confidence is infectious; but in all the meetings I have had, from the White House to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, I have also seen a humility about the scale of the challenges ahead.
So what lessons can we learn from this new administration? The first is simple: be honest with people.
Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who I saw on Friday, explicitly warned Americans last week that "even after the recovery gets under way, the rate of growth of real economic activity is likely to remain below its longer run potential for a while". The same, I believe, is true for Britain. As in America, I hope that growth will start to return in Britain at the end of the year. After all, we will have been in recession for almost two years by then – the longest and deepest recession since the war. But an end to the prolonged contraction still leaves unemployment high and rising, government debt soaring, the motors of growth broken, and a slow and difficult recovery ahead.
That is the truth, yet it is not what...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Where’s the barf alert?
[The first is simple: be honest with people. ]
Tell them the depression is almost over and five million jobs will soon be created. Tell them that spending like adrunken sailor will save them.
The subtitle was too long. It's weird too. It's written in the third person.
Obama’s honesty - now there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one...
“Barack Obamas’ honesty”???
That’s one thing I find coming into question, more and more, with each passing day.
I’d suggest that was an example of your dry English humor, except he apparently means it.
..... with the same values that brought us to a tired and embittered government desperately limping towards our electoral fate. The end is nigh!
Hmmmmmm......there I fixed it.
Apparently, another lesson not learned.
Just Damn!!! What shall our fate be?
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