The 2013 Maritime Administration budget is a saga of the transformation of an entire nation and the hard realities of the "Haves and Have-Nots." The once-proud Maritime Administration now dwells in cellar-status within the sixth-largest agency of the federal government while its insufficient budget of $344m becomes a footnote in the Obama Administration's recovery plan for revitalizing America and its transportation infrastructure in the 21st Century.

As the Administration picked at the crumbs provided to the maritime industry by decreasing MARAD's budget by another $5m next year, it simultaneously increased DOT's budget by $1.4bn to $98.5bn ($74.5bn in mandatory and $24bn in discretionary spending), giving additional infrastructure subsidies to the trucking, rail and air sectors. But it's the Administration's transportation revitalization plan, which intends to boost DOT's budget by more than 34 percent ($492bn) over the next six years (2013-2018) and lavish it on "runways, roadways and railways," that deliberately and utterly trivializes the maritime industry by excluding it from the national recovery plan.

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