Issue 2013: Spending & Jobs

by Justin Goldstein

With the start of 2013 there are big political challenges that must be put in place. First is our runaway spending and our runaway debt. I feel that we should restructure our entitlement programs, because there are too many people using it and not enough contributing to this program. According to the NY Times 50% of American people do not pay a federal income tax, which happens to be a huge problem. Also in the Washington Post, I read that in 2010, 49 percent of American households had at least one member receiving direct government benefits. In addition, according to FAIR, a conservative advocacy group, illegal aliens cost us taxpayers over 100 billion dollars per year. I feel that this is completely unfair for the minority who pay into the system to be burdened by a government who does not control spending. What our country needs are more taxpayers, not to burden the ones who pay our taxes with higher taxes.

Another problem happens to be our unemployment rate. Our president states that our unemployment rate happens to be 7.8%, but that is not an accurate description of unemployment. It does not take into account the people who are underemployed, gave up looking, and working part time now. Our government can do more to encourage job creation rather than punishing the job creators by taxation and regulation. Regulations such as Obamacare create financial burden on all companies that either provide health care or don’t provide health care. Some of the biggest companies that are affected are device manufactures, health care providers, and other health care innovators. For example, the cruise ship industry happens to be a 37.85 billion dollar business per year in the U.S alone. The number of cruise ships built here in the U.S is non- existent. So when people say where could jobs be created? Here is an example of where they can be created. Since Americans happen to cruise quite a bit we should also be able to build cruise ships. This could create many jobs, and they would be private jobs so government wouldn’t have to pay anything.

So if I were an advisor to president Obama the two biggest things I would push for are balancing the budget so that our spending is not out of control and the deficit is not increasing. Secondly is to encourage jobs so that we have more people employed and therefore more tax payers to pay into our federal government.