Obama's Dilemma: Debt vs. Jobs

When it comes to the economy, President Obama is stuck between a rock and a hard place: unemployment on the one side, then national debt on the other. “The entire town is more schizophrenic than I’ve ever seen,” a senior administration official tells The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber. “Everyone cares about jobs, and everyone cares about fiscal discipline. The weight shifts week by week, unemployment report by unemployment report.” Obama needs to find some way to signal to U.S. bondholders that he takes the deficit seriously while at the same time reining in unemployment to under 10 percent. Scheiber, writes, “The basic problem is that any additional stimulus adds to the deficit, while deficit reduction steps on a weak economy. And so Democrats now find themselves having to pull off a balancing act that would seem to defy the laws of economics: taking on both tasks simultaneously.”