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you reduce the deficit with taxes.

I smell a cop-out. With a deficit this massive, he'll have to both raise taxes and cut spending, and doing either of those would violate his campaign promises and turn public support against him. I doubt he ever had any intention of fixing the deficit, recession or no recession.

The problem with that is that a $10 trillion dollar debt and possible $1 trillion deficit is a crisis too. If the US defaults on it, or starts printing ridiculous amounts of money to pay for it and setting off hyperinflation, we're all screwed. The latter is a particular concern; thanks to the Bush Administration the Feds no longer have to publicize just how much money they're printing. By the way, it'd be great if Obama could start off this whole "change" thing by fixing that.

Obama has promised to cut wasteful spending (let's see if he really does it), but he's also promised plenty of spending increases in other areas. And he was one of the loudest voices calling for the bank bailout, so that shows how dedicated he is to spending cuts.