US responses to debt deal range from angry to angrier

Americans showed a range of emotions and responses to the debt-limit deal President Barack Obama and top leaders of Congress struck Sunday, but nearly none of them were positive. Except perhaps relief that the weeks of wrangling were finally over.

The agreement would cut at least US$2.4 trillion (S$2.88 trillion) from federal spending over a decade, but allowed the country to avoid a first-ever debt default and extended the Treasury's authority to borrow beyond the 2012 elections.

Phil Waters of Anchorage, Alaska, gave a variation of the most common response.

"It should have happened a real long time ago," said Waters, a 60-year-old semiretired helicopter mechanic as he sat inside Darwin's Theory, a downtown Anchorage bar. "It never should have gotten this far out of hand."

Mahto, a 35-year-old managing editor who works in health care information technology, said the agreement is the latest in a long string of times Obama has disappointed him, and vowed it would be the last.

"I'm actively opposed to this president now. That also goes for his party since they've been silent through the whole ordeal," said Mahto, who thinks the debt deal will lead to an Obama defeat in 2012. "Cutting the deficit will do nothing to get people jobs. Without jobs and without a liberal base, he will lose."

In Philadelphia, Patrick Lucey, 25, thinks the large federal deficit will definitely be a burden to young people like himself who will have to pay for government programs far into the future. But he was philosophical.

"It's something expected," he said of the government deficit. "It's not a surprise."

"I'll be paying bills, student loans, a mortgage for the next 30 years," he said. "I'm not going to let this bring me down. It's one more thing I'll owe. When you're born, you start owing."

ORIGINAL SOURCE

Content used in this not-for-profit blog remain the property of their respective owners.