Roubini : America Faces a Fiscal Cliff

Nouriel Roubini : Many things are expiring at year end. All the tax cuts on income, on dividends, on capital gains, on estates. There's an expiration of the payroll tax (cut). There is a reduction or expiration of transfer payments to state and local governments, to unemployment benefits. There is the expiration of infrastructure spending, and then there are the automatic cuts on discretionary spending, which came about because we failed to reach an agreement for reducing the budget deficit. The point is, all this is expiring at year end, and the hole will be $600 billion, or about 4% of GDP, and then we plunge into a nasty recession. Now, some items may be continued (if the Republicans and Democrats can agree to extend) but a realistic assessment is a fiscal drag. Even if the cliff is not a free fall because some items won't expire in an agreement, there will still be the beginnings of a fiscal drag, because you reduce disposable income by raising taxes, and (by) cutting transfer payments, you reduce aggregate demand by reducing government spending. - in USAToday