President Barack Obama’s administration says it is committing itself to boosting the economy.

That includes ensuring the passage of legislation that will have beneficial long-term effects on health care, energy, education and financial reform for 2010 and beyond.

Obama laid the groundwork for his proposals in the 2011 budget he presented to Congress on Monday. The $3.8 trillion budget proposals include implementing a jobs bill to put Americans back to work, eliminating tax cuts for Americans making more than $250,000 a year, imposing a fee on financial firms earning more than $50 billion in assets yearly and enforcing a three-year moratorium on government spending to reduce the deficit.

“A lot of people think that these seem to be fairly minor, small, little steps he’s taking or adjustments to recalibrate the mission of his administration,” said Bill Ballenger, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics and former Griffin Endowed Chair.

Ballenger said Obama is intent on proving to the American middle class that he is focused on their cares and needs in an attempt to alleviate criticism over concentrating on what the American public perceived as the wrong things — Wall Street’s problems — in the first year of his presidency.

Brad O’Donnell, president of the College Democrats, said the worst thing the president could do now would be to seem too close to the banks and executives of Wall Street and he needs to avoid being associated with them.

“He needs to not look like the establishment,” O’Donnell, a Clinton Township junior, said.

O’Donnell said the president should be harsher on the financial firms and banks whose irresponsibility led to the near financial crisis and hopes the fee the president is imposing is a “strong” one.

He said he hopes it will ensure that the American taxpayer will receive their “just rewards” for bailing Wall Street out. O’Donnell said the argument against such a fee, that the cost will trickle down to shareholders to the company’s overall detriment, is “absurd.”

“There’s no way that’s possible,” said O’Donnell, who also supports Obama’s initiative to reallocate $30 billion in recouped Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to community banks to encourage them to lend loans to small businesses in order to facilitate job growth.

“Small businesses are where all the job growth will be coming from, so it’s a good idea,” he said.

The counterargument

Republicans agree the president’s initiatives to spur job growth are important for economic success, but disagree fundamentally on how the government should facilitate that growth.

John Porter, vice chair of the College Republicans and Coleman sophomore, said the Obama administration is overstretching what it should and should not be doing and the government in general is taking on too large of a role in a lot of sectors.

The correct approach, he said, is to give tax breaks to corporations and reform financial regulations to alleviate bureaucratic red tape to lower the cost of doing business. That way, corporations can afford to hire more employees.

To do otherwise, Porter said, is cutting into potential profits, which would inhibit economic growth.

“We’d much rather give that money back to private citizens because there’s a lot more innovation and ingenuity in the private sector than there ever will be in the public sector,” he said.

Porter, who works at Wolverine Bank in Midland, said the president is “grabbing at thin air” with some of the regulations he is proposing, specifically banking reforms, in order to “use the crisis to his advantage” to prove to the middle class he is on their side.

Porter called the president’s initiatives to prevent proprietary trading and investments in private equities among banks unfortunate because the banks had nothing to do with the financial crisis.

Porter said banks did have a role in the subprime mortgage crisis, but Obama’s banking reforms are political in nature and the proposals would affect banks and corporations that did not receive TARP funds.

“The collapse of the financial system was all about mortgages. It wasn’t about trading private equity or proprietary trading; it’s a total over exaggeration of what really happened,” he said.

E-mail the author: Carisa Seltz