A quick review of something you probably learned in Civics 101:
On the first Monday in February, the president releases a detailed budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. This budget request tells Congress what the President recommends for overall federal fiscal policy.
Stripping what is normally a document of several thousand pages down to the barest of essentials, the budget tells Congress how much money the federal government should spend and what they should spend it on, and how much it should take in as tax revenues. The President’s budget is only a recommendation -- federal spending is ultimately decided by Congress (though the President must sign off on it).
As you heard frequently last year, federal spending usually exceeds revenues and the resulting deficit is financed through borrowing. Since this has been going on for years, the U.S. has dug themselves a fairly sizable hole from which Congress has spent a great deal of time trying to get out.
The easiest way to decrease the deficit is obvious –- spend less money. Sounds easy enough -- simply cut various duplicative and unnecessary programs and you’ll have a manageable budget. But like everything else about the federal government, it’s more complicated. For example, roughly half of the federal budget is set aside for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Defense programs make up another 20 percent of the budget, and six percent is set aside to pay down national debt. Add in another 14 percent for “mandatory” programs such as military retirement benefits, veterans' disability benefits, and unemployment insurance and you’re left with 10-15 percent of the budget that can actually be decreased in a given year. It is this small portion of the budget that keeps Congress arguing all year, every year.
If you’re the president and you’re trying to show fiscal responsibility, you attempt to trim as much of that portion of the budget as you can. A noble goal, but it can lead to some disastrous decisions, such as when the president chose to eliminate funding for the Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education (CHGME) program last year. Eliminating a program that trains 40 percent of the pediatric workforce – 5,600 pediatric specialists per year – to save .0085 percent of the $3.72 trillion federal budget did not sit well with the nation’s children’s hospitals. Last year, children’s hospitals worked hard to let Congress know that the President’s decision was short-sighted and based on faulty logic, which luckily resulted in Congress restoring the majority of CHGME funding at the eleventh hour.
Now we’re less than three weeks away from the release of the 2013 budget. It’s time to let the president know not to make the same mistake twice. Take just a few minutes to send a message to the White House and urge President Obama to maintain funding for CHGME. The health of our children is worth far more than .0085 percent of the budget, yet that’s all we’re asking.
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