Any sensible family has a budget that lays out how much will be spent for household and other purposes. Without such planning, things would quickly go awry.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A budget should be judged by whether it creates a foundation for the success of American working families striving to buy a house, or to send their kids to college, or to save a little for retirement and, if they're lucky, a vacation.
By necessity, budgets require hard choices.
What's the point of creating a budget if it's not possible to follow through?
Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.
What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'
Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they have to do a budget. Every local government, every state, knows they have to do a budget.
The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel.
The budget is tight, and that is exactly where we want it to be and where we need it to be.
And as you point out, for American families who struggle every day to figure out how do they pay, we talk about gasoline prices. That throws budgets into a real problem when you have budgeted really tight.
You don't lock into a ten-year family budget. You take it a year at a time - maybe even six months at a time. And then if the income really comes in the way you hope it does, then you can make some of those expenditures that you've been waiting to make. We think that same principle should apply to the national family we call America.