All Right Kids: Let’s Cut the Budget

Good news out of the Capitol, of the Washington, D.C. variety, last week as President Obama called for 'big cuts' in federal spending.

The President, on the 3-month anniversary of his taking office, finally got around to gathering his Cabinet for its first meeting at the White House. We’ll not take the bait and remind you that he had criticized his predecessors for not making better use of their Cabinets and instead focus on the news that he called for: budget cutting.

Yes, that is right. The President charged his Cabinet members to rush back to their respective corners and cut the budget by $100,000,000.00.

To most of us, that is a big number. But let’s look at in real terms of the U.S. Federal Budget. Mr. Obama has proposed a budget for the coming fiscal year of, now get this: $3,500,000,000,000.00. And his current request is to cut $100,000,000.00. Calculated another way, that is a cut of 0.0029%.

Keeping it real, let’s translate that into numbers the average family may comprehend. Assume the average family has a combined, before tax, income of $60,000. Because times are tough and they have been spending as if they had an income of $75,000, they decide to make a cut comparable to that proposed by the President. So, they drastically cut 0.0029% percent or $2.18 from their overspending ways and expect to see their budget come into balance.

So, that leaves them about $14,997.82 short of their goal of balancing their budget.

To give the President his due, he did not allege that the $100 million cut would balance the budget, but he did claim it was “significant”. Remember, he was the candidate who throughout the campaign said he planned to take a scalpel to the federal budget. He was going to go through the budget, “line by line”, and rid the taxpayers of all those programs that do not work, are inefficient or are just wasteful and duplicative.

All he has found so far is a measly $100 million out of $3.5 trillion?

Looks like he forgot to use the scalpel and is instead using laparoscopic surgery, aka ‘minimally invasive surgery’ (MIS).

Just remember those promises when you are told the expenditure of hundreds of millions, probably more like billions, will “save” us money on health care. Or that by imposing a tax on carbon ‘we’ll create jobs, reduce global warming and make us energy interdependent’. Get your wind generators here!

For now, why don’t you send the President, made out to the US Treasury, of course, a check for $3.18, instead of just $2.18 and let him know you are doing more to cut the federal deficit than he is willing to do on a percentage basis? By comparison to the President's recent effort, that extra buck is big bucks.

Yoda