Deficit Not Hurting Obama Ratings, Yet

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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GeithnerWhether people blame President Obama for growing deficits or not, his job approval rating is holding its own. A new Bloomberg poll of 1,004 adults conducted between September 10 and September 14 shows Obama with a 56% job approval rating. The same survey says that 61% of those asked still feel favorably toward him.

The one factor that undermine’s confidence in the president is the growing deficit. The most shocking result of the survey is that “Americans consider the deficit such a problem that a majority, 62 percent, say they would be willing to risk a longer-lasting recession to avoid more government spending.” It would be hard to find a gauge that demonstrates the mistrust of federal intervention than this one. People are willing to suffer and face high unemployment in exchange for securing what they think is a better economic future.

Almost every section of the poll results points in the same direction. A government that is trillions of dollars in the red is a government which threaten’s the nation’s prosperity in the next decade. People want the Treasury to balance its books the way that most citizens have had to. Perhaps the recession has taught them that living beyond one’s means is not sustainable.

Douglas A. McIntrye

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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