Washington, October 19: Despite being in an almost-12-trillion-dollar debt, US President Barack Obama may propose another stimulus package to create jobs and whether the recession-hit economy.
Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said on Sunday that Obama was considering all options available to him to tackle unemployment, which currently stands at 9.8%.
“Everything is on the table,” Valerie said, adding that “you’ve got this huge national deficit and we’ve got to do what we can to bring that down. At the same time, it’s important to stimulate the economy,” the Associated Press reported.
The United States’ national deficit has reached USD 1.4 trillion, with more than 4 million jobs lost so far this year.
The idea of another recovery package is floating around, while more than half of the existing 787-billion-dollar stimulus package is yet to be spent.
Another adviser, David Axelrod, believes that the measures taken by the US government are proving their effectiveness, with growth expected in the third quarter of 2009.
Axelrod, however, said that if the recovery initiatives end too early, the economy would sink back into recession.
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t look to the mid- and long-term for deficit reduction,” Axelrod was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.
“We have a stimulus program in place, an economic recovery program in place that is not even 50 percent through. We have to see that through. And we’ll see what other measures we need to take,” he added.
—–Agencies