Obama defends record as November polls loom

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has defended his policies during aggressive questioning after the worst US recession since the 1930s was declared over.

As audience members at a townhall-style meeting voiced exasperation at his administration, Mr Obama stressed he understood that people were frustrated. “Something that took 10 years to create is going to take a little more time to solve,” the president said.

Mr Obama challenged the conservative Tea Party movement and its Republican supporters to be specific about what government spending they would cut if they had the power to do so.

He defended his administration’s spending to boost the economy and said most economists agreed that such “emergency steps” were not a problem for long-term debt and deficit issues. “The challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It’s not enough just to say ‘get control of spending’,” Mr Obama said.

He said the group should be prepared to say it was willing to cut military veterans’ benefits, for example, or social security retirement funds and Medicare health insurance payouts to the elderly.

“What you can’t do, which is what I’ve been hearing a lot from the other side, is saying, ‘We’re going to control government spending. We’re going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts and then magically somehow things are going to work,’” he said.

The president said it would be “irresponsible” for Congress to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

“I can’t give tax cuts to the top 2 per cent of Americans” and “lower the deficit at the same time”, the president said during the hour-long discussion on jobs and the economy hosted by CNBC in Washington.

With elections that will decide control of Congress less than two months away, Mr Obama is making the November vote a referendum on his stewardship of the world’s largest economy. The biggest fight may be over tax cuts passed under former president George W Bush that are set to expire at the end of the year. – (Bloomberg/Reuters)