Democrat

The United States currently has a spending deficit of over one trillion dollars.

While that seems like a complete budgetary failure, the real failure is how most Americans understand it.

The deficit shows years of wasteful spending, but the deficit itself should not be a major concern.

People confuse the government’s budget with that of their personal or business budget.

The goal of private budgets is to make a profit, or to stem losses. Some people mistakenly look at the government’s budget from that perspective.

The role of the government is to use the resources at its disposal to benefit society.

Profit is not a consideration, the vision for the future is.

I would not want to live in a nation committed to a balanced budget over addressing the concerns of the people, which is unfortunately becoming a growing sentiment.

Resources are limited. Governments cannot spend without discretion.

Our current deficit is a problem. Some view it as a problem that needs to be solved immediately, which it is not. Controlling the deficit requires a long term solution.

The best way for the deficit to be addressed is to begin work on entitlement reform, increasing taxes and in the meantime cut military spending.

This is the approach taken by the Obama administration, albeit limited due to gridlock created by a do-nothing Congress.

Healthcare reform taken by the administration will help reign in cost, and $525 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2013.

Some people want to fix the deficit by cuts alone without raising taxes. The problem they encounter is that they aim to cut the wrong things.

They recommend austerity measures like those that have happened in Europe, such as cutting social programs.

European countries chose to cut social spending because that is what they spend the most money on.

Americans spend the most money on defense spending, so it only makes sense for most of the cuts to come in defense spending.

Another common sense measure is to raise taxes, even if it is just on the higher tax brackets.

A complete aversion to increasing taxes shows that one is not really concerned about the size of the deficit, but is instead using the deficit as a political tool.

There is plenty of room for defense cuts. According to SIPRI, a Swedish-based think tank, “U.S. military spending has almost doubled since 2001.

The U.S. spent an astounding $698 billion on the military last year, an 81 percent increase over the last decade.”

The same report also shows that the U.S. accounts for 42.8 percent of the world’s military expenditures.

We could greatly reduce our military spending and apply that money to deficit reduction.

I would rather cut funding for flawed military operations that detriment the country than social programs that actually help people.

The biggest problem for America is not the trillion dollars it has in debts, but ineffective governance that does not consider the citizen.

Michael is a freshman majoring in human rights and political science with minors in Arabic and religious studies.

Republican

Over the past 10 years the annual federal budget deficits have exploded.

In 2002, the remaining surpluses from the Clinton years disappeared and reached a peak of just over $400 billion in 2004, steadily decreasing until 2008. The first budget the new Democratic congress elected in 2006 got to put together, when it ballooned again above $400 billion.

And then we got the 2009 budget, which gave a deficit of over $1.4 trillion, largely due to the Wall Street bailouts of late 2008.

Then Bush left office, and Obama has given budget deficits of over $1.2 trillion every year since. Our current national debt is over 15 trillion, which means it is now larger than our total national GDP.

With a situation as direable as this, we can no longer afford the Keynesian experiment of economic stimulus through deficit spending.

President Obama’s most recent State of the Union address didn’t show that he has any true plan to use economic policy to fix this crisis, but instead intends to use it only for class warfare, spreading the lie that the rich don’t pay a high enough percentage of their wealth and that making them pay more would make a meaningful dent in the annual deficit.

The wealthiest five percent are already responsible for nearly 60 percent of the annual tax revenue, and the poorest 47 percent don’t pay any of their income towards the annual federal tax revenue.

In addition to this, Obama intends to continue to “invest” in various pet projects, which is just a thinly veiled euphemism for more spending.

The Democrat’s answer to dealing with these record high deficits is that all problems would be solved by a hefty tax increase, preferably on the wealthiest 5 percent, 2 percent, or 1 percent of Americans, depending on which plan you look at.

The secondary answer they give is that yes, we need to cut spending as well, but all we really need to do is cut defense spending and then our deficit will be manageable.

There is one major problem with this.

Defense spending only accounts for about 25 percent of our budget, and we’re spending more than 50 percent more every year than we take in every year.

Even if we cut defense spending to zero, we’d still have a deficit of about $800 billion. If we were to cut defense spending to zero and to raise taxes on the wealthiest 5 percent to 100 percent, we’d still not see a balanced budget.

Of course, a balanced budget is only a temporary goal. A true balanced budget would only mean that the debt was no longer growing each year.

We need to get large budget surpluses for many consecutive years in order to actually start paying off the debt.

The only long term way to deal with this is to significantly reform the way entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid work.

Yearly net interest on our debt also accounts for about 10 percent of all federal tax revenue and pensions also make up just under 10 percent.

Further, Democrats in congress insist on “protecting” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the Republicans who they claim want to gut these programs, but this is disingenuous.

The programs, if they aren’t reformed significantly, will disappear entirely in less than a few decades.

The Republicans’ plans for reform will save the programs for the long term, whereas the Democrats are only interested in keeping them the same in the short term for political expediency.

This demagoguery and these false solutions from the Democrats for the budget and entitlements will have to stop if the party is at all serious about long term fiscal solvency.

Tucker is a sophomore majoring in political science.