Question: These questions all get at the premise behind the plan: that the deficit needs to be reduced.
Ministers insist the deficit needs to be tackled and that the public purse must be restrained to enable this.
The mood in the country, if not in Washington (at least before the elections last November), is that the deficit needs to be brought down.
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They are angry that Republicans have pledged not to raise taxes and this pledge is more important than the deficit and needs of America.
Everybody acknowledged that the issue of our debt and our deficit is something that needs to be tackled now.
Economists at Lombard Street Research estimate that in order to meet its 1.5% deficit target, Italy needs to grow by 2.5% next year.
While he described the deficit as a serious problem, Congress needs to consider "whether or not we're hitting the deficit brake too soon, " Mr. Durbin said.
Instead, Mr Obama urgently needs to make deficit-reduction one of the dominant themes of his fightback.
Because, Furman says, the U.S. has a large budget deficit and because the country needs to invest more in health care.
In order to control the total government deficit the central government obviously needs to be able to control the spending of the provinces.
Indeed, at these rates it cannot afford to finance its own budget deficit nor the debt that needs rolling over in the near future.
But we think that to get the rest of the way there and get the medium-term deficit down to where it needs to be requires a bipartisan process and that's what we're pursuing.
"The most important thing to understand is that because France makes the efforts it needs to reduce its deficit and debt, France is credible when it asks the ECB to enter the fight to support growth, " Mr. Sarkozy said Wednesday on French radio.
According to the IMF's latest Fiscal Monitor, when you add their 6% of GDP deficit to the public debt that needs to be rolled over this year, France will need to raise an amount equivalent to more than 20% of their national income from the financial markets in 2011.
Its businesses are internationalising faster, and its persistent current-account deficit and bad infrastructure mean it badly needs foreign investment.
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Spain is barely growing and it too needs to tackle a budget deficit likely to be around 9% of GDP this year.
The President continues to hold out hope that Republicans will do that, and is certainly willing to make tough choices, as he has demonstrated in the past, to reach an agreement that does achieve the kind of balanced deficit and debt reduction that this country needs.
In fact, I have a vision that when the G20 meets later in the month in Seoul, that the world needs a new balance between deficit countries and surplus countries, and that balance has to be restored by paying more attention to the development -- of the development potential, including infrastructure development and energy infrastructure agricultural infrastructure in the poorer countries of the world.
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But the emergency budget promised for June 22nd will be trickier: it needs to show resolve on the deficit without sending the country back into recession.
But though clamping down on tax dodgers was not a priority of his 2001-06 government, it is a stated aim of this one (the treasury needs revenue to stop the budget deficit exploding).
And that suggests that should Congress and the next administration engage in a major deficit reduction plan, long-term care needs could easily be ignored, swept away by much more powerful tides of fiscal austerity.
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Because, of course, what needs to be deflated is not the deficit but the digits.
And it is worth remembering that slower domestic spending and higher saving is exactly what America needs to correct its current-account deficit.
Because that money needs -- the needs for that money in terms of deficit reduction and investments in clean energy are far higher priorities.
The Keynesians are still arguing that Europe needs stimulus, but it was rampant deficit spending that got countries like Greece into trouble in the first place.
America's government, for instance, needs a medium-term plan for deficit reduction, but cutting back spending viciously in the short term at a time of private-sector retrenchment would be a mistake.
Lower growth than that would make the public debt harder to bear and scare off the foreign capital that India needs to fund its current-account deficit and pay for its imported energy.
This kind of dangerous situation is exactly why sequestration needs to be avoided and sensible, balanced deficit reductions achieved.
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