While President Barack Obama’s appearance in Reynolds Coliseum will be the talk of the student body for the next few days, the major reasons behind this appearance will be forgotten. Obama’s new American Jobs Act has many commendable aspects, which will hopefully shock the United States’ economy into a more regular pattern. The final key element of the plan brings about the question of the feasibility of such an idealistic plan—the funding.
The American Jobs Act claims it will “put workers back on the job while rebuilding and modernizing America” and “put more money in the pockets of every American worker and family;” however, it raises the question of how will these initiatives be funded?
The plan itself projects a total of $447 billion invested in the different initiatives. However, this projection is justified with the disclaimer: “the President will call on the Joint Committee to come up with additional deficit reduction necessary to pay for the Act and still meet its deficit target.”
How this political mumbo-jumbo translates to the plan‘s funding is not yet determined, but the Joint Committee is supposed to make sure it stays on the targeted budget, while somehow reducing our debt.
This is not the first bill to have a vague funding statement. Too many times politicians purpose bills, which the funding is left open to interpretation. This is the type of spending that got us in this mess to begin with. Any college student could tell you, if you use loans to pay off your tuition, eventually you have to pay them back; you can’t continually keep putting it off.
This is not to completely besmirch the American Jobs Act. However, it is cause enough to raise concern for how bills and plans, like this one, can decrease the deficit when it has no concrete plan to do so embedded in it.
Bills should have a strict plan as to how they are to be funded, this way if and when Congress and the President approve and sign the bill into law, they will be held accountable with the direct financial plan tacked onto a bill.
If law makers had to consider making the budget for a bill before the bill can be approved, perhaps they wouldn’t pass so many haphazardly, and use their committee meetings to find ways to compromise.
So I urge you, when you are at events where politicians are presenting their plans, never take anything at face value. Whether you decide you support it or you don’t, it’s the decision that is important. What’s important is being able to dig deeper and find discrepancies, like funding for particular plans.
All this is not to say the American Jobs Act is an ineffective plan; but rather, the particulars of it, like most bills that go through Congress, are unclear and should be clarified from the beginning. Funding for a plan of action should not be TBD, but rather the first thought in the mind of lawmakers.
