Wednesday, January 21, 2015

2015 SOTU The Economy- Is There Any Hope On Bipartisan Agreement?

With the Recent State of the Union ,Obama spoke extremely positively of his government in all areas especially in the economy and spoke about how bipartisan the parties should agree on his newest reform ideas. For this first blog post I will only be concerned on his ideas regarding the economy.
His biggest concern was improving the economy for the middle class. His plan to do this is with a number of reforms starting with the proposal of mandatory paid sick leave for all employs over a period of seven days. This proposal on the surface sounds like a great idea but the more I thought about it the more I thought that it could really hurt smaller, family businesses that could not afford to have such cover, something I have seen with my grandmothers business.
His next proposal was a bill that would ensure that all women would be guaranteed to be paid the same as men. Something that many think is no longer a problem though when one looks at the statistics it is undeniable that women are being paid less than men for the same job. I believe this could definitely be a bipartisan agreement no only for its great effects in wage equality but its reminder that sexism still exists.
The following proposal instructed a raise to the minimum wage something that he stated was a clear necessity for people to survive in today's economy. I agree that today's minimum wage is not at a necessary level to be able to live off of however with raising the minimum wage does raise concerns of the effects on inflation and its effects on small businesses; will it be beneficial for the lower class and detrimental on the middle class and upper class business owner or will it simply improve the average quality of life- only time will tell.
Obama touched on education afterwards and its necessity for it to be cheaper to solve this problem he is proposing to make community college free. Once again on the surface this sounds amazing however community college is already relatively cheap, people don’t tend having trouble paying for community college, it is universities where people struggle to pay for college and garner up large amounts of debts and is where I believe many wish Obama was lower tuition.  
In accordance with this making education cheaper Obama also proposed being able to lower ones payments  on student loan, 10% of their disposable income once again this raises my question in how he plans on paying for this program and how he would get republican support.
Lastly Obama wanted to help lower income families. He plans on doing this through better child support policies and by ending the tax loopholes for the rich which he states the money could be used for programs such as this child support. My inquiries regarding this how would he get republican support on ending tax cuts for the rich and how will he get support from the republican on the 320 million dollar budget which will be taxing the rich harder than ever necessary to pay for this new child support. While a lot of these programs sound great, I’m not sure how beneficial most of these programs are let alone how he will get republican support on all of the new taxes required to pay for all programs.

How do you feel about Obama’s Economic proposals?( Paid sick leave, women payed the same as men, raise of the minimum wage, free community college, lowering of student loan payments, child support increase, cutting of tax loopholes), What do you like?, what are your concerns? What programs do you think the republicans will pass?

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