But it won't make any difference. The people who celebrated Obama's victory, thinking they had saved entitlement programmes like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from Republican cuts, are deluding themselves. America's unfunded liabilities, including these programmes, rose by $11 trillion last year to $222 trillion. To put that in context, the entire US economy is just $15 trillion, of which $3 trillion a year is paid in tax. If you expropriated all the wealth of the richest 400 Americans, as some Obama supporters appear to suggest, the $1.7 trillion you would get wouldn't make a dent.

Those programmes will not be saved by Obama's waffle. They will die because there is no money to pay for them and there won't be, no matter which box you tick. That is the lesson of the last few years and it is one the US is going to learn. The laws of economics have a habit of being enforced with the doggedness of Inspector Javert and the merciless brutality of Dirty Harry.