If President Obama and the leaders of Congress "announce a bipartisan package promising to curb mushrooming federal deficits, will it be real?"
This question that has many Americans scratching their heads is answered in the article Fiscal cliff: How to judge if debt cuts are real by Alan Fram, staff writer for The News & Observer. This newspaper has been in print since 1880, and is the regional daily newspaper for the "Research Triangle."
The article has broken the answer to the above question down into a brief checklist as to how to assess the government's work: overall deficit cuts; taxes; and spending. President Obama has suggested a ten year savings plan that would save around $4.4 trillion, and this is should be seen as a sign of seriousness (that things are actually getting done). According to the article, changes in tax laws are being debated, for example whether to raise the income tax for individuals making $200 thousand as well as families making $250 thousand. One of the ways spending is being cut is the hundreds of billions of dollars the Obama administration is saving by easing the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The author's purpose was to inform the audience, the American public, as to the state of economic affairs in America. I think he is able to achieve that purpose, because even me, who knows absolutely nothing about economics, is able to understand what the government is attempting to do in order to reduce the United States's $16 trillion (and growing) debt.
A literary device that, thankfully, was not used in this article was jargon. If jargon was used repeatedly, such as arbitrage pricing theory and zero-sum game, the common folk would have been hopelessly lost.
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