Upon the issuing of President Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2012, the nation will again endure a heated debate between the country’s two political parties. Author Robert Reich, analyzes the content and motives that the budget entails within his piece entitled The Obama Budget. Reich does not directly identify with a specific political party, or side of this partisan argument. This ambiguity becomes important to the reader’s interpretation of his ideas and the eventual understanding of his arguments. However, the author’s lack of clarity becomes less frequent as the paper progresses. In the second half of the paper, Reich’s personal beliefs in terms of the future budget become more prominent. The author’s assumptions and predictions with respects to the budget’s reception are evident throughout the piece, while also maintaining attention to impacts on inequality and governmental power. The left-right spectrum as outlined by Eric Foner can be applied to Reich’s essay and seen throughout its entirety. Similarly, the up-down relationship of governmental power is also discussed. These discussions enable the reader to loosely envision the location of Reich’s political ideas on the intersecting spectrums. In a fairly brief essay, Robert Reich manages to outline an entire argument and unintentionally speculate ideas of political partisanship and the ideologies that construct political parties, using the newly proposed federal budget, while providing personal insight and advice.
In modern politics, media news reports and opinion-editorial pieces generically obtain heavily opinionated and bias thoughts. However, Reich does not merely address the proposed federal government as fuel to his fire, but analyzes the impacts of the budget on th...
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...dget are, political debates are inevitable. Robert Reich’s goal is to recognize the root of these debates. Additionally, the reader is subjected to identify the uselessness of past methods used in Washington. The text is intended to provide a reasonable solution with which will prove to be a politically-centered approach of decision-making. Of course, magnified analysis will place Reich differently on the political spectrums, but these placements are to be taken skepticism. Political disputes and biased thoughts are not effective in directing the economy on an ideal path. Independence, non-partisanship and flexibility will help bring light to the end of the dark economic turmoil tunnel.
Works Cited
Reich, Robert. "The Obama Budget: And Why the Coming Debate over Spending Cuts Has Nothing to do With Reviving the Economy." Robert Reich. (2011): 1-3. Print.
Reich, Robert B. Nice Work If You Can Get It. The Wall Street Journal. 26 December 2003
The New Deal sought out to create a more progressive country through government growth, but resulted in a huge divide between liberals and conservatives. Prior to the New Deal, conservatives had already begun losing power within the government, allowing the Democratic Party to gain control and a favoring by the American people (Postwar 284). With the Great Depression, came social tensions, economic instability, and many other issues that had to be solved for America’s wellbeing. The New Deal created a strong central government, providing the American people aid, interfering with businesses and the economy, allowing the federal government to handle issues they were never entrusted with before. The strong, emerging central government worried conservatives, who supported a weak federal government with little interaction, and resulted in distinct party divisions (285). By allotting the federal government more political control during the early twentieth century, the government now can reign over state governments and affairs. Today many conservatives are still opponents to the strong federal government, finding issues with its involvement in local affairs, whether that be educational involvement through common core or business involvement through labor unions (Diamond 2; Weber 1). While the New Deal formed a divide between
Leading up to the year 1981, America had fallen into a period of “stagflation”, a portmanteau for ‘stagnant economy’ and ‘high inflation’. Characterized by high taxes, high unemployment, high interest rates, and low national spirit, America needed to look to something other than Keynesian economics to pull itself out of this low. During the election of 1980, Ronald Reagan’s campaign focused on a new stream of economic policy. His objective was to turn the economy into “a healthy, vigorous, growing economy [which would provide] equal opportunities for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination.” Reagan’s policy, later known as ‘Reaganomics’, entailed a four-point plan which cut taxes, reduced government spending, created anti-inflationary policy, and deregulated certain products. Though ‘Reaganomics’ was successful both at controlling “stagflation” and promoting economic growth, it has and always will be an extremely controversial topic regarding the redistribution of wealth.
The Great Depression tested America’s political organizations like no other event in United States’ history except the Civil War. The most famous explanations of the period are friendly to Roosevelt and the New Deal and very critical of the Republican presidents of the 1920’s, bankers, and businessmen, whom they blame for the collapse. However, Amity Shlaes in her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, contests the received wisdom that the Great Depression occurred because capitalism failed, and that it ended because of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Shlaes, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a syndicated financial columnist, argues that government action between 1929 and 1940 unnecessarily deepened and extended the Great Depression.
Money Well Spent by Michael Grabell is a book about Michael Grabell posing one crucial question about The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was the largest economic recovery plan in history. The $825 billion package known as “the stimulus” was five times more expensive than the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Moreover, the recovery plan cost well over a trillion dollars. In addition, one question Michael Grabell posed to himself: was the taxpayers’ money well spent? Therefore, to get his answers he followed the progression of the stimulus projects across the country, scrutinizing how reality and spin often collided.
Talbott, John R. Obamanomics: How Bottom-up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-down Economics. New York: Seven Stories, 2008. Print.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service. "Editorials on the federal budget". McClatchy - Tribune News Service. 03 Feb 2010 eLibrary. Web. 18 Feb 2010.
According to Perkins, Roosevelt’s policies were never politically oriented, but rather made for and by the people of which he was the leader. Roosevelt was not solely perceived as a nonpartisan president by New Deal proponents however, and that was evidenced by a New Deal economist portrayal of Roosevelt in 1970. The anonymous economist states that Roosevelt understood the importance of working with industrialists and the upper class citizens of America. Contrary to a common sentiment, through this alliance, the New Deal programs were bolstered, not sabotaged. The New Deal economist boldly asserts that Roosevelt was a friend of capital (5 A New Deal Economist). This sentiment was true, for Roosevelt’s main goal upon election was to save capitalism from extinction. At the time these documents were recorded, the Great Depression was either in full effect or a very fresh memory. Because of this, arguments that cried political extremism and detriment to the American creed were mere speculation. Presently, however, more than eighty years after Roosevelt’s administration, the New Deal’s abiding legacy is more lucid and is examined by the
The Frontline documentary, Obama’s Deal, tracks the course of Obama’s healthcare reform and the steps taken by the administration to get the bill passed. Healthcare was, and remains, one of the biggest platforms of the Obama administration and one of our nation’s greatest challenges. The film starts with Obama’s election into the White House in 2009. Rahm Emanuel, who had worked for the Clinton administration, was brought in to advise Obama on the reform. To win, Emanuel knew that Obama would have to move quickly as his campaign would be strongest at the beginning. But his crucial flaw was having Obama take a back seat on his own political agenda. Emanuel tried to change his mistakes from the Clinton administration’s healthcare failure, and
Robert Reich in his book titled" Beyond Outrage" has discussed the ways conservative on the political right view work to change the economy of the United States of America. The reason for the thought was from the condition of the economy and democracy which has been in the interests of the rich people leaving behind the interests of average working Americans. In his views, nothing good or positive happens in the capital as long as there are no protests brought out by some good people outside the president's office. In the points explained by him, the two points which are found most destructive are as follows:-
The New Deal period has generally - but not unanimously - been seen as a turning point in American politics, with the states relinquishing much of their autonomy, the President acquiring new authority and importance, and the role of government in citizens' lives increasing. The extent to which this was planned by the architect of the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has been greatly contested, however. Yet, while it is instructive to note the limitations of Roosevelt's leadership, there is not much sense in the claims that the New Deal was haphazard, a jumble of expedient and populist schemes, or as W. Williams has put it, "undirected". FDR had a clear overarching vision of what he wanted to do to America, and was prepared to drive through the structural changes required to achieve this vision.
Starting during the 1970s, factions of American conservatives slowly came together to form a new and more radical dissenting conservative movement, the New Right. The New Right was just as radical as its liberal opposite, with agendas to increase government involvement beyond the established conservative view of government’s role. Although New Right politicians made admirable advances to dissemble New Deal economic policies, the movement as a whole counters conservativism and the ideologies that America was founded on. Although the New Right adopts conservative economic ideologies, its social agenda weakened the conservative movement by focusing public attention to social and cultural issues that have no place within the established Old Right platform.
Angell, Marcia. "ObamaCare Confronts a Fiscal Crisis: Why the Affordable Care Act Doesn’t Add Up." New Labor Forum (Sage Publications Inc.) 22.1 (2013): 44-6. Print.
Schumaker Paul, Dwight C. Kiel, Thomas W. Heilke, Ideological Voices: An Anthology in Modern Political Ideas, New York, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1997.
Obama, Barack H. “Remarks by the President on the Economy -- Knox College, Galesburg, IL.” Galesburg, IL. Illinois, Galesburg. 24 July 2013. The White House. Web. 05 Apr. 2014