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
Leading up to the year 1981, America had fallen into a period of “stagflation”, a portmanteau for ‘stagnant economies’ and ‘high inflation’. Characterized by high taxes, high unemployment, high interest rates, and low national income, America needed to look to something other than Keynesian economics to pull itself out of this low. During the 1980 election, 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.
The Great Depression tested America’s political organizations like no other event in the 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. Amity Shlaes tells the story of the Great Depression and the New Deal through the eyes of some of the more influential figures of the period—Roosevelt’s men like Rexford Tugwell, David Lilienthal, Felix Frankfurter, Harold Ickes, and Henry Morgenthau; businessmen and bankers like Wendell Willkie, Samuel Insull, Andrew Mellon, and the Schechter family.
... cost and the financial system. Regardless, Michael Grabell in Money Well Spent also speaks about the deficit and says how it had more to do with the Bush tax cuts and prescription drug plan than the stimulus package and Grabell concluded that it could hinder America’s recovery towards a firmer foundation. In both books, each of the authors speaks about deficit, Recovery Act and signs of recession. However, Krugman defines each of the definitions and gives example afterwards and in Money Well Spent Michael Grabell gives his insight about the challenges America faced with undergoing recession, recovery act and deficit and how the taxpayers’ money were not well spent in his opinion. Given these points, I have learned a lot about the signs of recession, deficit and the recovery act in both of these books Krugman Economics for AP and Money Well Spent by Michael Grabell.
Talbott, John R. Obamanomics: How Bottom-up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-down Economics. New York: Seven Stories, 2008. Print.
Gerson, Michael . "The real-world effects of budget cuts." The Washington Post 7 Apr.2011: n. pag. Print.
zShmoop Editorial Team. "Politics in The Great Depression." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
...“Obama Stokes Deficit Fight.” The Wall Street Journal Politics. The Wall Street Journal, n.d. Web. 6 June 2011. .
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.
Kernell, Samuel, Jacobson, Gary C., Kousser, Thad, & Vavreck, Lynn. 2014. The Logic of American Politics 6th ed. Los Angeles: CQ Press
“The Budget and Economic Outlook : Fiscal Years 2010 to 2020.” Congress of the United States
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
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.
NERSISYAN, Yeva and L. Randall Wray (2010). Deficit Hysteria Redux? Why We Should Stop Worrying About U.S. Government Deficits. Nova York: The Levy Economics Institute, Public Policy Brief, Nº. 111. http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/ppb_111.pdf.
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