While the stories in the news of the actions that Congress, as well as the president take to balance the budget make it seem to be a fairly easy process of simply cutting programs that are wasteful, ineffective or outdated; the reality is much different. Based on the experience gathered from taking the “Federal Budget Challenge”, it is actually quite difficult to decide which programs should be cut and what means of revenue generation should be adopted (Next 10). The first challenge is that almost every program has positive and negatives. That is to say, each program benefits certain groups of people over others and therefore cutting or changing one will necessarily result in someone being adversely affected by the change. Consequently, since politicians need the support of the public to keep their jobs, making certain cuts most likely is an expression of who the politician needs support from and who the politician believes she can anger without much influence to their vote count. The second challenge is the complexity of some programs, policies or laws. The effect of the complexity is that is makes it hard to truly understand how cutting or amending the law or policy will affect the nation or whether the cut or amendment will be able to achieve its desired effect. Social security, for example, contains so many different elements and aspects that desiring to cut or amend it is one issue, but actually cutting or amending it presents a number of problems. This is especially true because, as mentioned, the politics that is often behind the decision. The third challenge is how to provide for defense and security without having a truly clear idea of the threats that are most likely to confront the nation. That is to say, choosing to fund one program is basically a guess that the threat will occur. If the threat does not manifest itself, it seem that it would be difficult to justify the expenditure.
Despite these challenges, chooses must be made. Accordingly, under my administration every aspect of spending would be cut except for investments, although no further additional investments would be made. The reason for this is that the current investments are worthy and will potentially provide a substantial benefit to the nation going forward. In regards to the cuts on spending, the largest cuts came in overall spending levels. The reasoning behind this decision is that if citizens have to “tighten their belts” so should the federal government. The next biggest cuts in spending occurred in defense and security. Cut decision in this category were focused on streamlining defense administration effectiveness, deucing redundant programs, and delaying development of weapons programs where there is no evidence that the threat the program is meant to oppose will actually pose a threat. Moreover, even if he threat manifests, there are alternative systems that can achieve the desired goals. Finally, cuts in health care and social security were made to streamline administration, increase competition with the industry and allow people to work to later ages. In addition to spending cuts, revenue was increased by almost the same amount of spending cuts. Increased revenue came mostly from comprehensive tax reform and increases in taxes on the oil and gas industries as well as on gas consumption. A secondary benefit of raising taxes on gas consumption besides raising revenue is decreasing the reliance on fossil fuels which would be beneficial to climate control and environmental issues that potentially will also require government funds to resolve.
In conclusion, based on decisions made from the simulator, my administration was able to achieve U.S. $1.77 trillion in spending cuts and U.S. $1.72 trillion in revenue generation for a total deficit reduction of U.S. $3.5 trillion and an over deficit of U.S. $ 4.1 trillion.
Works Cited
Next 10. “Federal Budget Challenge.” 16 Apr. 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2016. www.federalbudgetchallenge.org/responses
