A MAJORITY OF Americans are confident that President Barack Obama’s policies will improve the economy, although most fear that someone in their household could lose their job in the next year, according to two new polls.
The polls, which showed Mr Obama enjoying higher approval ratings than any president since Ronald Reagan in his first month in office, came as he prepared to make his first address to the joint houses of congress.
Last night’s prime time speech was expected to offer more details about Mr Obama’s plan to stabilise the financial markets and to describe how he would fulfil his pledge to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term.
“I think the president believes very clearly that we have to be honest about where we are,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC.
“Tonight, he will tell the country that we have faced greater challenges than we face now and we have always met those challenges.”
A New York Times/CBS Newspoll found that three out of four Americans were optimistic about the next four years with Mr Obama in charge, while a Washington Post/ABC Newspoll showed 68 per cent approving of the president's job performance.
Most respondents to both polls said they believed Mr Obama was trying to compromise with Republicans but that the opposition party was not trying to work with the president.
Mr Obama brought Republicans and Democrats together at the White House on Monday with representatives of unions, business and other interest groups to discuss ways of cutting the federal deficit.
The president wants to cut waste in government procurement, abolish federal programmes that are ineffective and dramatically reduce spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a move that could affect US investment in Ireland, Mr Obama says he wants to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
Mr Obama’s advisers say he has achieved more in his first month in office than any president in history but White House aide David Axelrod acknowledged that there was a risk in taking on too much.
However, “we believe the times demand vigour and aggressive action and so we’re having to do a lot of things at once,” he said.
Mr Obama plans to turn his attention next week to a major overhaul of the American health system, a key campaign promise that he believes is also essential to an economic recovery.
The Department of Health and Human Services said yesterday that healthcare costs would exceed $8,000 a person this year, consuming an ever larger share of public and private income.
“The outlook for health spending during these difficult economic times is laden with formidable challenges,” the department said in a report on medical costs.
White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said Mr Obama believed that rising costs were the main obstacle to securing medical coverage for all Americans.
“Healthcare costs are crushing middle-class families and the small businesses that fuel job growth in this country,” Mr Cherlin said.
“President Obama believes that if we’re going to get our economy back on track, we have to act quickly to address this pressing issue.”
A new estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the number of Americans without health insurance had risen to about 48 million.