The Eyes and Ears (The Dispute Over the US Budget May Affect Us)

The 2016 budget presented by President Obama to Congress reached $4 trillion, or what is roughly equivalent to the budgets of all Western European countries, with the Defense Department’s share totaling $585.3 billion, or what is more than all the combined defense budgets in the whole world.

This budget challenges President Obama to sweet-talk Congress into working with him in choosing smart investments instead of austerity. This isn’t as important to this Arab author as the question of how American political differences affect our interests.

How can the president achieve this? He wants to help the poor and middle classes by taxing wealthy American companies. The president believes that he will get $1 trillion from the proposed tax, increase the salaries of government employees and soldiers by 1.3 percent, and advance an ambitious plan to invest in public works over the next eight years.

He is defying Congress, where Republicans maintain a majority in both houses, by pressuring the wealthy who support them. The Republicans respond by saying that the budget proposed by the president is just a draft and that the real showdown will come in the following weeks when the Republicans propose alternatives. Personally, I fear that this dispute may impact the problems of the Middle East in a very negative way.

The president proposed reducing the accumulated annual deficit by $1.8 trillion over 10 years and said that if the Republicans don’t like his proposal, they need to present alternatives. I reserve my opinion and defer to those Americans who are more knowledgeable, such as Gen. David Petraeus and the great scholar at the Brookings Institution, Michael O’Hanlon. The two jointly wrote an article entitled “The Great American Comeback,” which stated that the unemployment rate fell, growth increased and the deficit fell to less than half the size of the days of the financial crisis near the end of the George W. Bush era. Gas prices fell ,and citizens are in a stronger position to deal with their debts and increase their consumption.

As columnist Dana Milbank said, Obama has the high ground. The Republicans may stop funding the Department of Homeland Security by the end of this month if the president doesn’t change his policy on immigration.

Objective commentators note the brewing battle between the president and the evil Likud-like Americans. Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, claims that Obama is at odds with the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress because he did not try hard enough to oust Bashar al-Assad’s regime from Syria in 2012. Additionally, the Democratic Party believes that he was too timid regarding the crisis in Ukraine despite Russia’s violations of another country’s sovereignty, and that in their nuclear negotiations, he presented to Iran very comfortable conditions that favored an aggressive Iran at the expense of their traditional ally, Israel.

The common thread is that both Iran and Congress are increasingly defying this administration. The House Banking Committee passed a law that would increase sanctions on Iran in June and will go to a vote on the 24th of next month while the two parties develop a framework deal with Iran.

I tried to look for solutions to the situation between the president and Congress but did not find any. Congress intends to challenge the president before he leaves office and to thwart anything that he may try to do. The dispute between the two parties presents major problems in our region. Republicans will try to disrupt the president’s work because they want only to carry out Israel’s request to focus on Iran.