Last week, President Barack Obama released his proposed budget for next year. With this budget, he has the opportunity to change and replace many of the automatic cuts that took place with the ridiculous sequester ordeal from earlier this year, which included $1.2 trillion in indiscriminate cuts to public programs. Obama’s budget makes a conscious effort at pragmatism and compromise with the Republicans. It offers some concessions to the Republicans on Medicare and Social Security, which has angered many progressives. But Republicans still are not happy.
Obama’s budget is $3.77 trillion strong, which includes a heavy mix of tax increases, spending cuts and new spending on infrastructure and other public projects to help boost the economy. It projects a deficit for the year of $744 billion, which is about $230 billion less than what was predicted for this year. Though that deficit is still massive, it is much less than the deficits we have had the last four years, which have all easily exceeded $1 trillion.
Under this new budget, benefits under Social Security would slow and income tax revenues would be raised, which will produce a savings of $230 billion in a decade. Another $400 billion would be saved from Medicare over a decade by benefit and premium changes along with reductions to health care providers.
Many Democrats around the country see these cuts as necessary if we want a truly progressive agenda. Without reform to these programs, they will continue to eat up the social program sector of the budget, and we would have to make cuts to other programs like Head Start.
Understandably, many progressive leaders and Democrat politicians are not happy with the president. The president of the union organization AFL-CIO called the changes “wrong and indefensible.” Progressive Democrats across the country feel as though the president is turning his back on progressive ideas, and in turn on social groups who need the most help.
But even though these cuts to Medicare and Social Security are even greater than what the GOP has proposed, and even though many of these changes were originally proposed by Republicans, there has been a huge Republican backlash to Obama’s plan. Paul Ryan told ABC News, “I don’t know if I would say that he cracked the door on entitlement reform. He has proposed to change a statistic, which saves money. That is really not entitlement reform.”
Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, the head of the House Republican’s campaign committee, even had the audacity to say that the budget was a “shocking attack on seniors,” signaling that the GOP will try to use these cuts against the president in the next election cycle, even though these cuts have been Republican proposals for years.
This is just yet another example of Republican hypocrisy and their absolute refusal to compromise on anything that comes out of President Obama’s mouth. It is undeniable that the major reason why our government is so partisan and so ineffective is because of this childish attitude of the Grand Old Party. They are acting like a bunch of spoiled toddlers who throw a fit in the grocery store because they cannot get the cereal that rots teeth.
Obama has said that these cuts will not go through unless the Republicans also agree to the tax increases that are part of the plan. So it seems compromise on a reasonable budget plan is still only a dream.
— Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected].
