The fiscal cliff has been all over the media, but what exactly is it? That is the question. Many students have heard the name of this deal on the news, in their classrooms or from their parents, but they don’t really know what it means for them or for the country.
“It’s supposed to raise our debts and we are going off the ‘fiscal cliff’. Basically our country is poor and everyone is freaking out,” said freshman Cherilyn Heintz
Many student are very vague about what think the fiscal cliff means if they even know what it is at all.
“I thought it was a cliff on an island name Fiscal,” said junior Jessica Ervin.
So to clear up the confusion, here is a short summation of the fiscal cliff. In 2011 the country was having trouble coming up with a federal budget, so congressmen agreed that they would set up a situation so horrible that they would never allow it. The two bad things were that they would raise taxes, which countries are never supposed to do when they are going into or coming out of a recession, and they would have a trillion dollars in mandatory spending cuts that would kick in. Fiscal means pertaining to financial matters and the metaphor of a fiscal cliff is that the countries finances would have fallen if it wasn’t taken care of.
“Fast forward to 2012, Congress is split, and the senate had put together a plan with the white house and the vice president. This left two days before the New Year and if the house did not take action and pass this bill they would be blamed for all the bad things about to happen. They did miss the deadline and ended up passing it a couple days after January 1st, but the Bush tax cuts were extended and no spending cuts occured. If this hadn’t happened we would have gone into a recession and the stock market would have plummeted. That’s the fiscal cliff, we only slid. We didn’t fall,” said Honors Economics teacher, Tom Painter.
The reason so many students are oblivious to the importance of the fiscal cliff may be because there are so few students at Chapin High School that pay attention to the news and stay updated on the economy of their country. Also, when students watch different biased news channels they only get one side of the story. Some students do however have an understanding of it from listening to their teachers.
“It is a financial crisis that we had to attempt to fix with a new budget,” said junior and AP Government student Presley Gilder.
Students should stay updated on the news and the state of the country, though, because it could affect them, especially those planning on going to college. College tuition is high so many students have to get government subsidized loans; if those cuts had gone through there would have been education cutbacks as well as cutbacks in student loans. They would also start cutting back on Pell grants for low income students which would mean many people wouldn’t get to go to college. Parents invested in the stock market would lose a lot of money if it had dropped and they had been using that money to save for college.
