All sane people want government (like everything else) to cost less. Due to the horrifying predictions about our national finances over the next couple of decades, our leaders are now faced with the inevitable, yet nearly impossible task of getting the United States out of the red. To this end, President Obama has proposed a budget for the fiscal year 2012 which includes plans to cut the combined federal budgetary deficits for the next ten years by $1.1 trillion, or roughly 10 percent. Certainly this budget alone will not bring us back to the days of surplus, but it is a strong step in the direction of fiscal sanity.
On the President’s chopping block is a broad array of targets, ranging from environmental protection to the Pentagon.
Importantly, unlike the anticipated Republican proposal, Obama’s budget is not all cuts. It also contains spending on such long-term investments as clean energy and infrastructure. These items are essential, the administration believes, to America’s future wellbeing.
Many on the left, including Paul Krugman, decry the budget for scaling back programs that aid low-income communities as well as environmental protection, both of which many liberals view as essential. They say that Obama is dancing too much to the Republicans’ tune. However, it is time liberals give up our anathema for all things electorally palatable. Avoiding cuts is politically and morally impossible, and although it would be preferable to dig deeper into Pentagon spending than let aid for the poor fall by the wayside, the $78 billion Obama has already proposed cutting from Defense spending over the next four years is worthy of applause. We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
In an era when the American political climate is such that the conservative party’s base-line proposal starts with the figure of $100 billion in single-year cuts and then decides which programs must go, Obama’s budget looks especially levelheaded. Given that preserving every government program in its current condition was never an option, and considering the fact that America likely won’t countenance a majority of cuts coming from defense spending, Obama has proposed the most liberal budget that has any chance of success. If by no other metric, the fact that Paul Ryan is accusing him of an “abdication of leadership” is evidence enough that the proposal is sufficiently liberal.
In considering the merits of Obama’s budget against the alternatives, however, it is important not to presume that the Republicans are still the monolithically unified group we’ve seen over the past two years. In an unusual turn of events, it appears as though Republicans may face as much infighting as Democrats about what budget items are sacred and what must go. Many Tea Party Republicans accept the reality that the Pentagon will have to face cuts, a fact exposed by Wednesday’s vote killing a contract to build F-35 engines. The Republican establishment, on the other hand, refuses to watch a dime get taken away from their baby. Both Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor wound up on the losing side of Wednesday’s vote.
The Tea Party Republicans’ willingness to kill defense contracts is both surprising and encouraging, considering that the spending plan that came out of the House Appropriations committee last week included both $100 billion in cuts and a 2% increase in defense appropriations. With one wing of the Republican Party refusing to acknowledge that the military is not perfectly efficient, and with the other wing seemingly overeager to dismantle the government, Obama’s budget is likely to be the only reasonable one passing through Congress this spring.
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