In my opinion, in order to balance federal budget, the government should both cut down
certain area of federal spending and increase the revenues. There are three major expenditures that
government has to pay on throughout this year which are health care, Social Security, and defense.
Health care is the hugest disbursement of the government. Instead of providing the full assistance,
we should request the patient to pay 15 percent of every medical bill. In addition, defense has taken
up 20 percent of federal expenditures, which is even higher than spending for education. The
amount of money for foreign economic aid was up to 43.1 billion, which is too high and wasteful.
In present, there are many countries in the world suffer from poverty and war. Our government is
unable to help all of those countries. Therefore, as we can see, our government has favored several
countries over others. Our government usually prefer to spend money on economic and military
aid for the countries that can give back benefits in political power than the nations that really need
the assistance. Sometimes the aid that we provide for those poor country does not reach our
purpose because poor countries usually have corruption in their government. They may use the
funds that we provide to benefit themselves instead of helping their poor citizens or investing in
profitable purposes. Therefore, we should cut or reduce the spending for foreign economic aid and
consider about choosing the deserved countries that really need support to spend our budget wiser.
Besides decreasing the defense area, the government should also increase the taxes. Since
smoking and drinking alcohol have negative health consequences, increasing the excise taxes is
reasonable. We could double the excise tax. It does not only increase the revenues but also increase
public health which will soon decrease the federal health care spending. The federal gasoline tax
which has not been increased since 1993 should also be raised. Increasing the petroleum tax could
reduce the environmental issues and increase the use of public transportation. We could rise the
tax on gas online from 18.4 cents to 50 cents per gallon, which would create significant positive
difference for the revenues. The customs duties can also be increased but only for the products that
are made in China. Since China has very low labor cost, their products are very cheap. Increasing
tax on China’s goods will bring competitive advantages for our own products. Last of all, the
individual income tax could be increased. Income tax rate can be raise by 3 percent, which will
yield higher revenues.
The national debt is getting higher every year. Therefore, the federal budget can be
managed and controlled if the government know how to balance the revenues and expenditures.
Raising some certain areas such as excise taxes, individual income tax, or customs duties can help
increase the revenues. The expenditures can also be reduced if the government cut down the fund
for foreign aids and limit the health care.