Even if the reader can relate to the frustrations expressed in The Daily Free Press’s budget editorial (“Budget bullet: un-bitten,” Feb. 3, p. 6), he or she is unsure of who or what to be angry at. The editorial admits “no one person’s voice, no one act. . .can single-handedly heal the financial hurt,” but later refers to President Barack Obama’s “insincere and untimely urging” and says that he needs to “address the country with a unifying goal: get out of this mess.”
Yes, Obama campaigned on a personal vision, with “post-” as the prefix to every vice on the Bush-era catalogue But he is not the Benevolent Overlord of America.
Obama understands that his 2011 proposal is imperfect and that he amputated programs that were precious to both sides of Congress. He knows that, in turn, they will see to a bloodletting of his suggestions before they approve.
What the editorial overlooks is the essence of 2011 proposal; it is precisely “intelligent and sensible.” It will be, for Americans, about as dramatic, swift and sexy as “Jane Eyre.”
His freezes do exclude the heavyweights: Health, education, defense. They instead apply to going-to-the-moon expenditures, and aim to divert inessential funding toward long-term investments: education, infrastructure, improved energy technology etc.
The effectiveness of the freeze is predicated partly on restored discipline: the forgotten PAYGO system, robust (that is, enforced) in the ’90s. It saved tax money that furnished the surpluses and allowed growth. The president hopes to animate small business employers and create jobs by recovering TARP money from the “big banks” and cycling it through community banks as credit to small businesses; he aims to create more domestic jobs (or at least promote them) by slashing tax cuts for U.S.-based companies that outsource their labor but enjoy the profits here. It’s a bitter pill, but we didn’t we like the sound of “post-corporatism?”
As for “soaking the rich” through taxation, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did the same in 1935 to no real revenue increase. But Obama is not “soaking the rich.” He is allowing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy from 2001 and 2003 to expire, and eliminating the “itemized deduction” feature of tax returns. These adjustments represent $338 billion and $179 billion, respectively. The actual increase on individuals will bring in $118 billion; in no way marginal, but ostensibly neutralized by cutting a miscellany of programs. Bush gratuities for the rich, the collapse of a house-of-cards market after the surplus heyday and the self-interested collective leadership over that decade is what we permitted and what has led us here.
So, the notion of shortsighted, useless “softening” of the debt is a backwards criticism. Whether or not it works, the budget aspires to a decade-long arc of deficit recovery, oxygenation of the public lifeblood of education and services, and something categorically un-American: penny-pinching and patience.
Elizabeth Jones
COM/CAS 2011
Boston University College Democrats
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