Snow: Cutting Budget Deficit Top Priority By Glenn Somerville LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Wednesday that cutting a record budget deficit was a top priority for the second-term Bush administration and challenged Europe to play its part in helping trim the U.S. trade gap by boosting its own economic growth. "The current account deficit is a shared responsibility," Snow said in prepared remarks for delivery to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, adding that Europe should introduce reforms to make itself a more attractive investment site through tax cuts and other measures, just as the United States needed to save more. "Specifically, they need to grow more rapidly," Snow said in reference to U.S. trade partners, implying that would be more fruitful than complaining that a declining U.S. dollar was making it harder for them to maintain strong export levels. He repeated that the U.S. supports a strong dollar and said a strong dollar was in America's and in the world's interest. Snow's remarks were aimed at countering mounting European criticism that the United States was running up recklessly large budget and trade deficits that were putting the dollar's value on the skids and hurting Europe's prospects. But they were also intended to set the tone for a weekend meeting of the Group of 20 in Berlin. Snow wants to shift the spotlight onto European tardiness in adopting labor, pension and other reforms and cutting taxes to spur their growth instead of being under the glare of charges that the United States had no real plan for cutting deficits and was letting its dollar drift down to remedy them at Europe's and Japan's exporting expense. DEFICIT HAWK Snow described himself as "a life-long deficit hawk" and insisted the U.S. budget deficit will cut in half over the next four years to less than 2 percent of national output. His visit to Europe is his first foreign trip this year after crisscrossing the United States to praise President Bush's tax-cutting policies in the run-up to the Nov. 2 election. The shortfall between the government's spending and its income swelled to a record $412 billion, or 3.6 percent of national output, in the 2004 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The other U.S. deficit that attracts European ire -- the current account that includes merchandise and investment flows -- was running at a record $660-billion pace in the second quarter or more than 5 percent of national income.     Continued ... Quelle "Snow: Cutting Budget Deficit Top Priority" : reuters.com Main page for "Snow: Cutting Budget Deficit Top Priority"