“Yes, We Can” Cut Spending, Obama Promises

In the summer of 2008, when he promised his people that they could hope for a better life and a resuscitation of the “American dream,” Barack Obama must have known that the moment of truth would eventually come. That moment came with the unveiling of the federal budget for the 2011-2012 fiscal year. Now it is time for him to announce, “Yes, we can” cut public spending.

When Obama was elected, the U.S. was already experiencing a real estate crisis; the Wall Street crisis of September 2008 had not yet surfaced. Nevertheless, Republican opponents accused Obama of heading to the White House with a “socialist” agenda. They predicted he would spend additional hundreds of billions of dollars and that he would “bloat” state structures, thus pushing America toward bankruptcy.

By and large, their fears have come true. The main solution to the crisis put forward by the Obama administration was implemented by the Fed, which is an entity completely independent from the executive [branch] and consisted of printing money. The “quantitative easing” was supposed to be a “money injection” that had the ability to strengthen the American economy (the final surge of $600 billion was given at the end of 2010), but this plan failed to come to fruition.

The financial system survived, in spite of the increasing number of banks becoming insolvent. This number increased from 26 in 2008 to 140 in 2009 and to 157 in 2010. The main patient — the economy — is still struggling. The body that monitors it can no longer continue without getting its hands dirty.

The budget plan for the coming fiscal year goes to show that, if only formally, the government is joining the nation in its suffering, as it will receive amounts diminished by $1.1 trillion until 2021. These cuts, however, will have the greatest impact on the lives of those who will no longer benefit from certain programs and will not affect government officials to the same extent.

There will be less money for student loans, for heating assistance, for the protection of the Great Lakes and the conservation of forests. There will be less allocated to public clerks’ salaries, which have been frozen for five years. This freeze will not affect the lobbyists Obama has rewarded with positions within his administration, although their time spent in the government would have been profitable enough for them if they had received no pay at all. From bill to law, Obama’s budget has a long battle ahead, with a hostile Republican majority in the House of Representatives pushing for even more drastic cuts, as well as with the Democratic Party, which will try as hard as it can to postpone the diminution of certain sums or to prevent cuts that are too big.