Monday, April 20, 2009

THIS is a Budget Cut? Come on!

This morning President Obama is to hold his first Cabinet meeting (does this strike anyone else as odd? He's been president for nearly three months now) and is going to tell them to immediately cut $100 million—collectively—from their budgets.

As this foxnews.com article points out, this amounts to 1/35,000 of the overall federal budget this year. This is approximately 0.0029%. Let's contemplate that.

To scale, this would be approximately the same as asking the average American household to cut one or two dollars per year from their household spending. How could they do that, you might ask?

  • Buy one or two fewer sodas from the machine this year.
  • One less trip to Starbucks.
  • Buy the steak when it's on sale and put it in the freezer until you're ready to use it.
  • To hijack a democrat idea, make the kids buy their own candy or dessert next time.
I have some other good ideas, even for those daring souls who would like to cut three, four, or perhaps five dollars from next year's family budget.

But getting back to the more serious issue: It is laughable to ask for only $100 million dollars in "immediate" cuts—he should be demanding $100 billion now in "immediate" cuts! And there should be more cuts to follow in the months ahead. The federal government is so excessively full of pork, waste, and inefficiency that this is both realistic and relatively easy.

What we have here is just a faux show of "budgetary responsibility"—and not even a good one at that—which will be presented in much of the media as serious budget responsibility.

2 comments:

Brenda Brough said...

You would THINK that with the entire cabinet there these "fabulously intelligent" people running the UNITED STATES could come up with something more substantial and beneficial than that!! That's why I'm not in there, but I was thinking these people could up with something better than that.

Anonymous said...

Stop serving Kobi beef at white house funtions for a year - that would save about $100 million. ;)