CRITIQUE OF 2011 FEDERAL BUDGET

Critique of 2011 Federal Budget

Critique of 2011 Federal Budget

Introduction

First of all, if you are going to reference facts such as no country in the world owe more money than the United States does. Second of all, while the US may owe more net money than other countries do, there are a couple of important things that have failed to consider, first and foremost being that the US is the world's largest economy and therefore should, logically, owe the most money considering the scale on which US economic transactions take place, even in the best of economic times. What is important here is context, and the US does not owe more money per capita, proportionally to the size of its economy, than many, many countries.

Discussion

The problem the Republicans have right now is that they aim to cut budgets, federal spending, and the deficit, but have no idea how to do it.  Social Security is the number one expenditure of the U.S. government, taking up approximately twenty percent of the 2010 budget, or $678 billion.  This is untouchable on two levels.  One, Social Security is a mandatory expense and hard to change.  Another factor is that the demographic of those who currently qualify for Social Security, senior citizens sixty five or more years old, is quite large and is growing due to the Baby Boomer generation.  This is a large chunk of the electorate and the Republicans cannot afford to piss them off, so to speak.  The same logic can be applied to the Medicare and Medicaid programs, numbers four and five, respectively, on the spending list.  A discretionary expenditure, the Department of Defense, is the second highest expense of the federal government with nineteen percent of the budget.  But do we really think Republicans would even think of cutting any of the national defense budgets?  God forbid we lower our spending on X-ray guns and missiles that can obliterate a house of cards in Croatia from a cornfield in Nebraska. (Nas, 2011)

House Republicans were chugging along on their “cut $100 billion from this year's budget” train, making no stops along the way.  The “Pledge to America” campaign train lead by Speaker of the House John Boehner had no intention of slowing down until that $100 billion cut was achieved - until it reached a small town called “Reality.”  This is all a silly metaphor for something ...