Though the Obama stimulus crested in the second year of his presidency, this was offset in 2010 by cuts to other areas of federal spending and a crushing contraction in state and local spending. Though it suited no one to acknowledge the fact, between 2009 and 2010 Germany’s deficit was actually increasing more rapidly than that of the United States.44 Though the arguments were apparently more transparent, the politics of fiscal policy in the wake of the crisis were in their own way no less opaque than those that framed monetary policy.
