Showing posts with label token. Show all posts
Showing posts with label token. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2009

Obama proposes token spending cuts

President Obama has asked his Cabinet to cut $100 million dollars from the budget. This might seem like a lot to us working stiffs, but it is a drop in the bucket to Washington. As Instapundit blogged,
FAKE BUDGET CUTS? “In our age of trillion-dollar budgets and deficits, $100 million is a rounding error at a Department of Agriculture regional office.”

Here is another comparison from Yahoo Finance,
For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:

--Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.

--4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.

--Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.

--7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.

--1/10,000th of the government's operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.

Basically, this cut will amount to a middle class family dropping two Starbucks lattes a year.

According to Fox news, Obama said,
"$100 million here, $100 million there, pretty soon even in Washington it adds up to real money."

If only President Obama would take those words to heart when he is proposing trillions of dollars in new spending.