April 20, 2009
A picture is worth a thousand words
Given the ease with which Obama bloviates -- at least when in the presence of two or more teleprompters -- a well-drawn graphic can help separate the wheat from his chaff.
In this case, take a gander at just how significant -- "ludicrous" is my preference -- the president's proposed spending cuts are, when put in context.
The Heritage Foundation quotes Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who says:
To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year–approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.
Talk about misdirection: Watch how I put a penny back in your pocket with one hand, while I take a trillion pennies from your piggie bank with my other hand.
Obama is playing us for suckers, and implicit in that is a deep and abiding contempt for the voters, who are apparently too stupid (in the president's opinion) to understand just how insignificant this cut is.
Ed Morrisey notes that cutting $100 million from the $3.5 trillion budget for FY2010 represents a decrease of 0.0029%.
Obama apparently wants to answer the Tea Parties by showing that he’s capable of limiting the growth of government, but $100 million barely registers in Washington these days — and certainly does nothing to slow down the Obama spending juggernaut.
[...]
The cuts that Obama proposes don’t even amount to 1% of the pork Obama signed into law last month in the omnibus spending bill.
This is fiscal irresponsibility on a scale so massive as to almost be beyond human comprehension. And before you begin with the "Well, where were you when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor?", two responses.
First, I hold Pres. Bush and the corrupt Republicans in Congress responsible for their spending; do so now and did so then, which is why I am not a member of the GOP, aka the Stupid Party.
Second, notwithstanding the above, Obama and his cohorts -- including the Democratic Party hacks who have controlled the Congress for more than two years -- have managed in less than 100 days to make Pres. Bush and the GOP look like paragons of fiscal virtue and restraint.
You really can't look at this graphic too much.
This is the overall federal debt B.O. (before Obama) and P.O. (post Obama). Note well that Pres. Bush on his worst day couldn't preside over deficits like these, even with the help of all the feckless crapweasels in Congress.
Someone once observed, when musing on the numbing affect of large numbers, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
The same principle is at work here, albeit with dead presidents, as opposed to dead enemies of the State. The numbers are so vast that the government is counting on us becoming numb to how awful they are.
But measures like this -- stupidly small cuts -- serve only to remind people how bad things are, when $100 million represents chump change.
And that quote? Political wisdom from the greatest mass-murdering tyrant of the 20th Century, Josef Stalin, who made Hitler look like an amateur, killing more of his own people than the Austrian paperhanger managed in four years of total war.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 20, 2009 06:05 PM
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