Shelby DeHaven, Editor-in-Chief
February 4, 2015

On Monday, Feb. 2, President Barack Obama sent the 2016 federal $4 trillion budget to Congress for approval. “With a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry and booming energy production, we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth,” stated Obama in the introduction of the budget.

The President stated that the budget is designed bring the middle-class into 21st Century. “These proposals are practical, not partisan.”

The budget is broken down into four sections with sections two and three having multiple subsections. Section one, titled “Building On A Record Of Economic Growth And Progress,” is focused on fiscal progress. Section two is focused on “Investing In America’s Future.” Following that, “A Government of the Future” is in section three. And to round it out, section four discusses cuts, consolidations and savings.

Section two is the section of the budget that will be most influential to the citizens of the United States. “Since the President took office, the deficit has been cut by about two thirds. The Nation has seen the slowest health care cost growth in 50 years, with the largest reduction in the number of uninsured Americans in decades. The high school graduation rate is about 80 percent for the first time in history. Both the crime rate and the incarceration rate are falling.” This section is broken down to 10 sections focusing a wide variety of issues including affordable education, health care, immigration, the criminal justice system and maintaining national security.

Section three is focused on the future of the government. The executive branch focuses on “effectiveness,” “efficiency,” “economic growth,””improving results” and “reorganizing Government” to describe the goals and objectives of this sections.

Section four focuses on the cuts, consolidations and savings that will be occurring if the 2016 budget is passed. “In the President’s first six Budgets, the Administration identified, on average, more than 150 cuts, consolidations and savings averaging more than $23 billion each year. Many of these proposals have now been implemented, and the Budget builds on this success by including 1010 cuts, consolidations and savings proposals projected to save over $14 billion in 2016.”

So why should we care about the budget? Well this budget will determine how much the United States will be adding to the $18 trillion (and growing) national debt in the years to come. The big question now is how much of a fight is Congress going to make on this budget?