Budget 2.0

Early yesterday morning, the US House of Representatives, under the leadership of new Speaker of the House John Boehner, passed a FY2011 budget that cut approximately $61 billion in federal spending. Democrats across the government decried this budget as “draconian” stating that the cuts would negatively impact the US economy and its citizens. Why are we even having this debate?

Last year, Democrats in both the House and Senate refused to even propose a budget for FY 2011. Why? Because they were afraid of the political impact in last years elections should they proposed a budget that either cut certain discretionary spending that the public opposed or a budget that kept on spending money that the government doesn’t have. Realizing the huge political implications in an election year where the American public were angry at the way the Washington, DC continually operates, Democrats realized that their position related to the budget and the US debt were causing a huge surge towards the Republican party and away from the Democrats. Independents, Republicans and Democrats across the country were angry that unlike everyone else, the US government decided that it didn’t need to limit spending in an economic downturn and instead dramatically increased spending by nearly 25% since FY 2008. No business or family could afford to increase spending at such a rate when revenues decrease.

So instead of doing their job last year and at least proposing a budget, the Democrats decided to do nothing and just implement a continuing resolution that maintained spending at FY 2010 levels. Fearful of the political implications of actually doing their jobs, Democrats decided to just maintain spending at FY 2010 levels. That certainly isn’t leadership. That certainly isn’t doing the job that they were elected to do. And they wonder why they were thrown out of office at such a large rate last November and why they could be in for more losses in next year’s election should they once again refuse to seriously address the fiscal problems facing America.

Another result of the budget crisis/debate going on in DC is the impact it has on state and local budgets. Two years ago, with the passage of the “stimulus bill”, many states put off making the necessary tough decisions to remodel their state budgets. They used stimulus money to offset budget deficits that many were required to balance. Now that there is no additional stimulus money coming into the states, many are faced with severe budget deficits. Much has been made regarding Wisconsin’s proposal to ensure that state government employees start contributing to their own pensions and to pay a small portion of their health benefits. Schools across the state were closed Thursday and Friday when teachers called in “sick” in order to protest in Madison against these reasonable proposals that almost everyone outside of government employees already pays into, usually at a much higher rate. Teachers, who typically cry out that their job is to help develop the children of our country, decided that the best way to teach our children is to walk off their job to protest having to do what everyone else does. Governor Scott Walker told the residents of Wisconsin during the campaign that he would propose these agenda items and would fight certain collective bargaining rights of state workers. All the Wisconsin plan entailed was eliminating collective bargaining with respect to pay, not benefits and to have elections every year to make sure that the employees still want to have unions represent them. As President Obama stated two years ago in one of his few meetings with Republican leaders, “elections have consequences.” Republicans won across the country, except possibly in California, and have committed to reigning in spending and it seems that the Democrats are too afraid, or just hoping to use this issue as a political tool to try and minimize their losses in future elections.