Last week, President Barack Obama announced his budget cuts for the rest of the fiscal year. Obama plans to lower the budget to reduce the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion in ten years by cutting many programs from the federal budget. In this he will cut two hundred very diverse programs.
In these two hundred programs includes a reduction in subsidies for wealthy farmers. Currently, wealthy farmers with up to $750,000 in income are eligible for federal aid of $40,000, according to CNNMoney.com Obama’s budget cuts will cap this benefit at $30,000 and reduce the maximum income to be eligible for these benefits to $500,000.
Another program being cut from the annual budget is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, LIHEAP. This program is designed to provide heating during inter and cooling during the summer for low income families. This program received $5.1 billion in federal funds in 2009, according to the Huffington Post.
Along with these programs there wil be cuts made to community service groups and other action groups. Organizations like homeless shelters and soup kitchens will be suffering a big hit from Obama’s plan of action to reduce the $14 trillion debt.
As opposed to Obama’s plans for the cuts, other republicans and democrats say that these cuts do not go deep enough and will not be quick enough to lower the nation’s ever growing national debt.
The only problem is that neither party will produce solutions for the monsterous problems. It seems that the issue of the amount of money the country continues to pay on medical care and social security continues to go unaddressed. Instead most of the budget cuts come out of only one percent of the annual budget.
If there is to be any kind of change, money is going to have to come out of bigger spending portions of the budget. Yes the cuts are what Obama calls “painful” but what is even more painful than these cuts is not being able to provide jobs and a future for our children.