May 21, 2013 - 11:22am
Seeing Red: Unbalanced budget
BY JEREMY LEE
On April 10th, President Obama revealed his proposed budget for 2014, referring to it as both “responsible” and a “compromise.” However, these two descriptors are ambitious at best — as Representative Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) put so eloquently, “the president’s budget isn’t a compromise, but a blank check for more spending and more debt.”
The basic terms of the budget involve tax increases on Americans, cuts to domestic programs, the military and — more surprisingly — modest entitlement reforms. While the terms of the budget are just a step in the right direction, it’s a very small step in itself. In fact, it fails to even reach the basic goal of a budget — to be balanced.
The age-old adage 'quid pro quo' effectively describes the scenario as Obama continues to make promises with the expectation that he can make Republicans move on the position of taxes. Similar to a broken record, President Obama once more wants to increase taxes and close tax loopholes to generate revenue of about one trillion dollars. In return, he promises to reform both Social Security and Medicare by modestly trimming down the costs of both programs. This part of the deal represents a large change in the mentality of liberals, as the Democratic base has never been one to make concessions on these entitlement programs. While I applaud Obama for finally putting these programs on the bargaining table, he has to realize the reformation has to be even more drastic, and he can’t be delirious about increasing tax revenue so severely. His idea that with this budget he has met Republicans more than halfway can only be declared as insanity.
The importance of the budget can hardly be stressed enough, as it’s one of the few things that affects everyone. At a time where our country’s debt is at a staggering number and increasing every second, the necessity of having a balanced budget and cutting back our debt is more pressing than ever. Even the amount is hard to process, as the surreal amount can only be broken into realistic parts through debt clocks such as the one shown on usdebtclock.org. Probably the most pertinent issue that’s coming with this high level of debt is unemployment — an issue that affects every student around the country. Obama’s budget predicts full employment around the year 2018, leading me to believe he’s suffering from delusions of grandeur. Even if Obama has facts to back up this very lofty goal, his past promises haunt and steer credibility away from him. In his first budget for 2010, he stated unemployment would fall below 5.5 percent by 2013, an inaccurate number any simple Google search could tell you, as it currently resides at 7.7 percent. Then later in 2012, he came out with the prediction of full employment by 2016. His lack of ability to keep these goals makes it very hard for people like me to believe this new “2018 goal” through his new budget will be any different.
While this budget shows some steps in the right direction, there definitely needs to be more concessions on the side of President Obama if an efficient budget is ever to be agreed upon. As students, it can be easy to distance ourselves from problems such as these due to the fact the generation before us currently has responsibility. But what we have to recognize is that problems such as the budget affect us all — maybe in terms of unemployment, social security for our grandparents, etc. Being in the position of students gives us a unique position to make our presence known to the government and have a voice. As George S. McGovern put so well, “the highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”
Jeremy Lee can be reached at jermylee@umich.edu.
