The spending cuts this week that Obsorne announced were worth £81 million. The British are justifying these cuts because they say that the welfare state is no longer affordable at the current state of Britain right now. This is affecting the middle working class because their jobs are most at risk. This is also going to largely impact the poor because their services that they are accustomed and dependant on receiving no longer have the funding, so can no longer be given out. All of the groups of government are going to cut back as well. 490,000 public jobs are expected to be cut over the next few years. Even the Queen has announced that she will not have Christmas party in order to cut back spending. Students, who have been accustomed to free education, are now concerned about how much they are going to have to pay. Business leaders are welcoming the budget cuts but a lot of people studying how these cuts will affect people say that the poor will be hit the hardest.
The British make a lot of budget cuts and tax increases. The Obama Administration, while although still faced with this problem, acted by giving the US a stimulus package. Instead of just taking more money from the people in order to save the economy, the Obama Administration pumped money into the economy to give it a jumpstart. It is like if your car battery dies and you need someone with jumper cables to jump start your car. In the Obama Administration, government is the car that has a good battery, and the economy is the car. The car with the good battery pumps an electrical current from its batter to the other car, or the economies, battery. The Obama Administration crossed their fingers that the economy, or the car with the dead battery would start. This analogy also applies to Britain but instead of trying to jumpstart the car, they completely get rid of the old car with the dead battery and trade it in for a unicycle. Now, the people who were once accustomed to being able to drive at fast speeds without fear of their battery dying, just as government agencies spent money without questioning the total balance left, are now left to their own devices trying to ride a unicycle and keep up with the rest of the world economy. Just as you might speculate, this is going to cause problems for not only the people of England and Britain, but also for the globe as a whole.
I think that neither the approach that the Obama Administration took nor the cuts that Osborne announced are good. I think that taking the approach to pump a lot of money into the economy without specifying exactly where it should be spent didn’t help. Instead of spending the money that the government intended to go straight into consumer goods, the people decided to save it for when the rainy day came along that shed light on the fact that we didn’t have any money left. This left the US weak and the deficit increasingly higher than before. On the other hand, I think that Obsorne’s cuts are harsh as well. Not only does he cripple the middle working class, but at the same time, he wants to get rid of the welfare state completely. If you look at the idea of Progressive Era President Roosevelt, you that that he reinvented the idea of his safety net to catch people when they fall through the cracks. Well, if there is no form of a welfare system, meaning that there is no safety net, and you are forcing the working class people into poverty, what is going to happen to them? I personally think that the people of Britain need to realize how fortunate they’ve been up to this point in terms of not paying for university. I have quite a few university aged friends in England, so I can understand their point of view, but as an American and a 17 year old girl that is waiting to figure out how much she has to pay for college, I tend to have a little bit of a pessimistic view on people who are complaining about paying less than a third of what I will probably have to pay.
Osborne’s move shows us that politics in Britain right now are, as mentioned earlier, up in debate. The problem is that the whole world is engulfed in this financial crisis and each individual country is struggling to make change that will benefit their country the most. Whether pumping money into the economy or cutting public benefits and dumping havoc on the middle class, each country is trying it’s best to survive. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the time up until Christmas plays out.
