President Obama has reportedly asked his Cabinet to share in the sacrifice that all Americans are making by slashing a painful $100 million from his budget.
But while the media will spin this another example of a no-nonsense president taking a chainsaw to the budget, the one thing they're missing is that the chainsaw is really more like a dull butter knife.
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One hundred million dollars is 1/35,000th of the total budget. It would be like blowing $100,000 on a stereo system, but returning a $3 cable. Would your wife marvel at how responsible you are or would she file for divorce?
One hundren million dollars is a joke — a joke that gets even less funny when you consider that we're spending more than $100 million every 2 hours in interest on our debt alone!
It's also reportedly going to take President Obama's Cabinet 90 days to make these deep, painful cuts — something that would take you and I about 10 seconds to do. Cutting programs that even the government admits aren't working like: $83 million for educating migrant workers; $169 million for "air quality grants" or $900 million dollars on Amtrak.
There, I just saved about $1.2 billion.
The Department of Homeland Security says it can save $52 million just by buying office supplies in bulk. If you can save that much on office supplies, how out of whack is your budget?
Maybe the problem is that our president and his advisers just aren't looking at all of this the right way. Think of our entire economy as an airplane that's rolling for takeoff down a runway that's shorter than normal because we've got to get this bird in the air.
The problem is that we've got a ton of baggage weighing us down: Higher taxes on job creators, union bureaucracies, global warming taxes and — of course — massive government spending (George W. Bush and Barack Obama have spent $12.8 trillion in the last six months alone.)
All of that baggage is beginning to concern the passengers. We're all sitting in the back, separated from the captain and we're worried that we might not lift off in time.
Do I still think we can?
Yes, barely. But then there's one more big problem: Once we get into the air and breathe a big sigh of relief we'll soon realize that the blue sky is not real.
Like a scene from "The Truman Show," the wall that our plane is going to hit is the wall of debt, including all the deficit spending we're now doing, along with the $1.25 quadrillion of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security obligations that if we don't act we could be on the hook for.
One hundred million dollars is not much of a sacrifice when just our interest on our debt is over $1.2 billion a day.
Just like Jim Carrey's character, we know in our gut that something is not right; that we're living in an illusion.
So while everyone is applauding our captain cutting a $100 million in baggage here or there, it's just a distraction because even if we get this plane off the ground we are still headed right for a wall.
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