We have a structural deficit that is real and growing, apart from the financial crisis.
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The structural deficit is most likely the most critical economic issue of our time.
That implies the government is slightly ahead of its plan to cut the structural deficit.
Of that figure, 4.8% is the structural deficit that George Osborne's Budget is intended to tackle.
And we've got a structural deficit that threatens to leave our children a mountain of debt.
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And this, in turn will force them to revise up their estimate of the structural deficit.
Firstly, the chancellor is meeting his structural deficit target a year early, on his previous forecasts.
"How to deal with this structural deficit undoubtedly will require both tax and spending initiatives, " Collyns added.
But what we will not have solved is that huge structural deficit that existed the day I walked in.
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We've got a long-term structural deficit that is primarily being driven by health care costs and our long-term entitlement programs.
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The federal government's finance plan calls for an annual reduction in the structural deficit of 0.2% of GDP starting in 2011.
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Mr Osborne made his big fiscal decision in 2010, when he announced a rapid timetable for eliminating Britain's large structural deficit.
Fed Chairman Bernanke also warned House members to focus on a rising structural deficit and its possibly harmful effects on the economy.
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"If fiscal policy is too tight for too long, you can actually end up increasing the structural deficit in the long-run, " he warns.
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Barclays Capital thinks the OBR overestimates spare capacity in the economy and that planned spending cuts will not be enough to eliminate the structural deficit.
The mandate obliges the government to work towards eliminating the structural deficit over a five-year period through a mixture of spending cuts and tax rises.
As I explained at the time, that one decision almost took the government back to square one when it came to cutting the structural deficit.
The fact that Democrats have no budget or plan to attack the deficit simply confirms CEO suspicion that this government will not address structural deficit issues.
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The structural deficit - which is the part expected to be impervious to economic recovery - is the largest of all the countries in the G7.
That skepticism is even deeper for Belgium, which is asking for more time after cutting its structural deficit by just 0.4 percentage point of GDP over three years.
Madrid's structural deficit - which strips out the effect of the recession - fell only by 1.4% of GDP last year, barely half the 2.7% target set by the Commission.
In Europe, economists at the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, produce official estimates of the gap between actual and potential GDP that are crucial for calculating the structural deficit.
The central target was to eliminate the current structural deficit - that's the borrowing which is not for investment and not expected to go away naturally - with economic growth.
"In the current structural deficit we're in, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the decision, but I would support, if I had to, the closure of both schools, " he said.
In a challenge to Chancellor George Osborne's central argument, Mr Cable says debt-funded capital spending "would not undermine the central objective of reducing the structural deficit and may assist in reviving growth".
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Without action, the accumulated weight of that structural deficit, of ever-increasing debt, will hobble our economy, it will cloud our future, and it will saddle every child in America with an intolerable burden.
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However, the OBR says the structural deficit - the part of the deficit that is not automatically reduced by economic growth - will widen from Labour's prediction of 7.3% of GDP in 2010-11 to 8%.
In most rich countries raising the pension age to, say, 70 by 2025, and thereafter linking it to life expectancy (which keeps on increasing), would go a long way towards reducing the government's structural deficit.
By 2015, for instance, the IMF reckons America will have a structural deficit (ie, the deficit that would prevail at full employment) of more than 6% of GDP compared to 4% for the euro area.
That allows the Treasury to claim the chancellor has already followed the Fund's advice, since the Fund now forecasts he will make slower progress cutting the structural deficit over the next few years than previously thought.
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