Europe will push for a swift exit from fiscal stimulus programs and a focus on budget consolidation at the G20 meeting next week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday.
"European participants are of the opinion that this is urgently necessary to prevent such crises from happening again in the future," Merkel said in her weekly podcast.
As Ed Morrissey explains, this is going to put Obama and the US, as a whole, in a different role than we're used to fulfilling. We'll be taking a back-seat to Europe regarding financial matters instead of a leading role:
It’s a strong rebuff to Obama, who explicitly asked the EU to continue its stimulus spending despite the debt issue in the US reaching a critical stage. It puts the Obama administration to the left of Europe on economic policy, never a comfortable political position in the US. With the Europeans abandoning big-spending programs in order to start whittling down the massive debt piled up from decades of social spending and weak economic growth, there will be less enthusiasm for continuing to ignore the American national debt in favor of make-work projects in the US that has done little to lift the economy here.
Furthermore, the divide threatens to weaken American economic leadership in the G-20 if Obama insists on pursuing big-spending programs and increasing American debt. Europe will see that as a sign that the US has not learned any lessons from the Greece failure, and that the Obama administration wants to follow the Greeks into collapse. We’re becoming a bad bet, and the EU knows what that looks like.
Are we living in bizzaro world? Has the United States started moving to the left of Europe? The European Union has seen right there in their own backyard with Greece what happens when deficit spending and debts run amock, and their not wanting to see the sequal in their own countries. So, they've decided to go back to black instead of diving deeper in the red as Obama seems determined to do.
Europe has been inching to the right for a while now. With the election of more center-right candidate like the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe has seemed to have seen the error in their socialist ways, for now. Will Obama learn from their mistakes? Doubtful. Apparently, he won't believe them that the iron is hot. He's going to burn his hand learning that drowning in debt is no the way to dig ourselves out of this economic and financial hole that both parties have dug ourselves into. Hopefully, the upcoming conservative wave that should hit Washington in November will turn things around, and we'll focus back on the getting rid of the debt instead of adding to it.
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