To cope with deficit problem :

Obama pushes for bipartisan fiscal commission

US: US President Barack Obama Saturday repeated his promise to create a panel of Democrats and Republicans to suggest strategies for long-term deficit reduction.

“I’ve proposed a bipartisan Fiscal Commission to provide recommendations for long-term deficit reduction,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

“Because in the end, solving our fiscal challenge — so many years in the making — will take both parties coming together, putting politics aside, and making some hard choices about what we need to spend, and what we don’t,” he explained. “It will not happen any other way. Unfortunately this proposal, which received the support of a bipartisan majority in the Senate, was recently blocked,” the president said.

He said he wanted to name the panel by executive order, and he was expected to do so as soon as next week.

The US government released a budget projecting the federal deficit in the fiscal year ending September 2010 will reach a record-breaking level of 1.56 trillion dollars, or 10.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This would be the highest deficit since World War II.

The US Treasury projects that the debt to economy ratio will fall to 4 percent in the coming years. However, budget experts are skeptical about the figure.

Washington, Sunday, Xinhua