Times can be tough. We are going through a recession, jobs are hard to come by and people are being forced to be thrifty with their money. Businesses are being hit too. They are being forced to lay people off, cut hours or lower compensation. They have to make these tough decisions to help their companies survive. So as individuals and private companies are tightening their metaphorical “belts,” why, then, does the government continue to spend with reckless abandon?

Being in college, most of us have limited resources. We understand that sometimes we cannot get everything we want because we simply don’t have the money. We can’t get every new iPod that comes out or run out and buy the coolest phone. Many of us don’t have the best TVs or cars, but we understand we cannot afford them and make do with what we have.

We have to cut out things that we would love to buy and try to save money on the items we need — for instance, Busch instead of Bud. There are some things that we cannot help but buy, such as gas, food and textbooks. So we go and try to get the best deal available, the best bang for our buck. We search the Internet ahead of time so we can find the cheapest gas, go to Kroger instead of Whole Foods or Harris Teeter and order our books from Amazon instead of buying them new and free of those annoying scribbles.

The government needs to start understanding these principles that students have to live by. But the problem is the government doesn’t seem to feel as though it has to. It is going on massive spending binges and we are already stuck with an unsustainable amount of debt — $12 trillion and rising. Our last presidential administrations have added to these figures by spending massive amounts of money and borrowing much of it from China.

As government officials, they have yet to understand there are some programs and ventures that might be great and help a lot of people, but as we students know, you cannot always have everything you want. You have to focus on the things you need. Those government officials need to do the same. They need to realize that if they figure out ways to save money in the “necessary” programs (and God knows there is a lot of money to be saved) and cut some of the unnecessary ones, we can get out of debt, or at least start working on getting out of that hole. Now, the Obama administration is proposing new, massive amounts of spending in the health care bill.

The administration is not only disregarding the option of cutting programs and spending less, it is actually proposing adding billions to the national debt in the next 10 years. And to be noted, if this government program is anything like other government programs, such as Medicare, it will most likely cost even more than anyone could have thought.

We cannot let the government do this. The government has to implement the same techniques that we, as students, use in everyday life.