Much like a fat man at Pope’s Fried Chicken who sets out to lose weight by ordering himself an eight piece family meal and double side of mashed potatoes with one white and one brown gravy, extra biscuits, fried okra, and a fried pie – but with a small Diet Coke, Obama finally rolled up his sleeves and set to the nasty business of spending less. He’s directed his cabinet to trim $100,000,000 from the budget. Far be it from me to run down any attempt to limit government spending, but who put Dr. Evil in the Oval Office?
Seriously. Obama can’t even go for a billion in savings? Think of it this way – Obama’s new budget contains $650 billion in new non-war related spending. What he’s asking the cabinet to do is the equivalent of a parent telling a teenager with $6,500 in new clothes she’s spending too much and she’ll have to take something that costs one dollar back. Or, as Republicans pointed out, that $100 million is what we’ll pay every day in interest to cover February’s stimulus bill.
Still, it’s something. Then again, Number 2 must have spoken with Obama at some point between the time he put down the saving pencil and grabbed the spending Marks-A-Lot:
President Barack Obama on Monday proposed a $100 billion U.S. loan to the International Monetary Fund to boost the IMF’s resources and urged a bigger stake in the IMF for emerging powers.
In a letter to U.S. congressional leaders, Obama said the U.S. funding “does not represent a budgetary expenditure or any increase in the deficit since it effectively represents an exchange of assets.”Thank goodness there’s a new era of transparency or I’d ask why the man who oversees the Treasury department needs to send a letter to Congress if it’s just a non-budget exchange of assets? Money supply is the domain of Treasury, they can buy or sell debt as they see fit. Either way, we’ll end up eating it in the long run. Does sending money to the IMF fill anyone with confidence it will be used wisely? Sand down a rat hole.
Clipping a coupon to save a dollar on coffee in the morning and writing a check for a $1,000 pair of boots in the afternoon isn’t really saving money. The AP is even mocking Obama. That’s like your mom heckling you at pee wee football.
There is one thing about today you can take to the bank – come October 2012 we’ll hear Obama boast about how he saved money through bulk purchasing of office supplies. And nobody at the AP will remember how he unremarkably spent 1,000 times more in the afternoon.
