In response to public outcry regarding his gargantuan $3.7 Trillion budget (including 565,000 Tea Party protestors and counting), President Obama has ordered his new cabinet to find $100 Million in savings over the next 90 days. Mr. Obama says:
"I'm asking for all of them to identify at least $100 million in additional cuts to their administrative budgets," Obama told reporters afterward. "None of these things alone are going to make a difference, but cumulatively, they would make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone."
Now, while the new management spends the next 4 days cooing all over this proposed '1st step' (isn't everything with them a 'first step down a long road to re-election'?), let take a look at what this amounts to:
$100 Million in budget cuts is:
-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.
In fact, here's what it looks like on paper:
When I first saw this headline, I thought it was a mis-print - surely $100 Billion would be a good start, $100 Million must be a misprint, right? Yahoo Finance says it's the equivalent of asking a family that spends $60,000 in a year to save $6.
Is that 'setting a tone' or is it 'tone deaf'?
UPDATE: Liberal Paul Krugman defines 'lame effort':
Except, you know, really it doesn’t. Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending.
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