Posted at my new blog App-lesauce:

Every where a hundred million...

President Obama is asking every department to cut $100 million from its budget. An article over at The Heritage Foundation has an excellent graphic of what $100 million looks like next to the porkulus bill and the even more enormous federal budget for 2010.

I just wanted to give some more comparisons to show how minute these cuts really are:

$100 Million is to $3.69 trillion as the population of Wyoming is to the population of China.



$100 million is to $3.69 trillion as Earth is to the sun...

...if the sun were 342 times as big as it is now.

$100 million is to $3.69 trillion as a sockeye salmon is to a blue whale.

Laid end to end, $3.69 trillion in thousand dollar bills would circle the earth 2.34 times.

Laid end to end, $100 million in thousand dollar bills would run for 9.46 miles roughly the distance from the White House to Falls Church, Virginia.

If the government found $100 million to cut every day, it would take them over thirty years to pay off the current national debt.

The current share of the national debt for every man, woman and child in the United States is $36,558.

The $3.69 trillion 2010 budget is equal to $12,056 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

A $100 million dollar cut would equal 32 cents for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

To paraphrase Heritage, asking the government to cut $100 million from its budget is like asking a family bringing in $100,000 to cut out one cup of Starbuck's coffee. Not per day, per year.

President Obama announced plans (really just intentions, not plans) to cut dozens of government programs deemed inefficient. How is he going to do that? By creating two new positions of course!

President Obama said Saturday that he would soon announce “the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective,” and he used his weekly radio address to name two new high-level officials to assist him in that effort.

If I were running a business, and had to cut my workforce, you can bet I wouldn't do it by hiring someone else. The city of Alexandria tried the same thing when they hired Michael Gillette, an ethicist, to make the decisions of what programs to cut. In case you are geographically challenged, Alexandria is very much a beltway town. How's that change working out for you?

Harry Reid may not be able to find the time to smell the tourists this year, judging by his first week leading this Senate. Democrats wanted to hit the ground running, but Rod Blagojevich tripped them up and instead, they hit the ground with a wet thud.

When Blago was arrested, Reid drew up a letter demanding that Blago resign and not make the appointment, and had all of the senate democrats sign it. In the letter, he said, "Please understand that should you decide to ignore the request ...and make the appointment, we would be forced to exercise our Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 5, to determine whether such a person should be seated."

Reid backed down from that statement the day after the pictures appeared of the black Roland Burris and his black entourage being stopped from entering the 'All White Mens' Club'.


Technically, the law is on Reid's side, though, as the Senate has the final say in who its members are.

Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.
Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.

Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

This is only one of the stumbling blocks that the democrats faced this week, as Bill "Horatio Sanz" Richardson withdrew his name from the nomination for Secretary of Commerce. This was a known issue to Obama's vetters since before his nomination, so there must be something there we don't know about.

Then there was the appointment of Leon Panetta as director of the CIA. Appointing an intelligence chief without any experience is about as smart as electing a president with absolutely no executive experience. Oh, wait, we did that one, didn't we?

Let's not forget about Obama's 'present' vote on the situation between Hamas and Israel. He conveniently use his new mantra "One President at a Time" in deferring all decisions about US reaction to the conflict to Bush. Come on, Bam-Bam, you only have ten days before this all falls in your lap. You must have some kind of opinion.

Finally, there was Obama's backtrack on his economic stimulus plan. This week, Obama told the country that we would be looking at huge deficits for years to come. Let me guess... four years? Eight years? In doing this, he has admitted that his plan won't work. He also revised the word 'created' to 'saved' when talking about jobs in his plan. This may have been smart on Obama's part. How do you measure a 'saved' job? Will he take credit for every job not done away with during his tenure? Using that standard, three million should be a fairly easy goal to reach.

So this is what it's like when the most ethical congress teams up with the chosen one to solve all of our country's woes. Flip-flopping, continued deficits despite a trillion dollar stimulus package, vacillating in the face of terrorism, questions of integrity... and that's just in the first week. This is going to be a looooooonnggg four years. I can only hope that the segment of the population who gets their news from Entertainment Tonight and The Daily Show really see what they have gotten us. It would be too much of a stretch for them to realize that this has been going on for the past two years and was being passed off as Bush's fault.

I read a very thought provoking and rather well thought out post today at DemConWatch. With the burst of the housing bubble, multiple industry bailouts, and loss of jobs, government at every level is looking at cutting services and raising taxes. But which services to cut? Which taxes to raise? Taxes are, after all, a necessary evil as our government needs to get funding from somewhere.

That article asked for comments from the readers, and I am doing the same. If taxes have to be raised, or services cut, which do you feel are necessary? Below is the comment I posted on their site. Just a little setup: the commenter before me posted a list of things like tax on gasoline, taxing incomes of the wealthy, and sin taxes. Here is my comment:

I heard something today...

The sin taxes might actually be detrimental to a budget in the long run. When they impose a sin tax, it is usually a little more about changing behavior rather than making money. In Virginia, Tim Kaine is proposing doubling the tax on cigarettes in order to offset the cost imposed on medicare and medicaid when smokers develop emphysema/lung cancer. If they didn't smoke, though, chances are that they would live much longer. We would have many more people living many more years and the cost of general health care for all of them, even if all they required were routine checkups and treatment for minor illneses, would equal more than the outlay under the system where individual freedoms may mean that people choose to live a little more recklessly.
As far as what services to cut? I agree with Karen-Anne in that there is a whole lot of waste that needs to be cut before any essential services lose a penny. They should look at expense accounts and future contracts, and they should definitely look for more efficient ways to govern before raising any taxes or cutting any services. If our leaders tell us that sacrifice is essential, they need to set that ball rolling by setting an example.

In the business that I am in, I have seen expenses in certain areas swing to the good by large amounts simply by stressing to the employees the importance of "best practices". I have seen the same accounts swing back terribly when those same practices are allowed to fall by the wayside. The difference? Better management led to the good swings while poor management led to the bad. Our leaders, no matter what the level of government, are being paid to manage their local/state/federal governments. It is time they start doing so.

Alexandria policymakers are finding it hard to make the tough decisions that must be made when budget cuts are unavoidable. Property values in the area have dropped, leaving a sizeable hole in the city budget. Their solution? Pay an ethicist $9,000 a year to make the decisions for them.

Faced with painful choices about who will suffer most from looming budget cuts, Alexandria officials have taken the unusual step of paying a professional ethicist to help them grapple with the moral issues involved.

Michael A. Gillette is an ethicist who works for area hospitals helping them make decisions about patient care, but he has taken a part time job making decisions for the leaders of Alexandria as to who should and who should not bear the brunt of budget cuts. He has proposed things like turning apartments initially being built for the mentally ill into temporary homes for the disabled.

"If the limb comes off, at least you saved the life. That's what true scarcity feels like," said Gillette, a Lynchburg, Va., City Council member who often uses the battlefield clarity of old "M*A*S*H" episodes to goad his listeners.

First of all, shame on the "leaders" of Alexandria. They were appointed/elected specifically to make the kinds of decisions that they are now pawning off on Gillette. Politicians today are not capable of making really tough decisions because they feel they will not get re-elected if they take services away from their constituency. So they hire an ethicist to make the decision. Now the onus is on the ethicist, and the politicians continue collecting a check for the work that they farm out. Ethical? I think we should ask Mr. Gillette.

In Alexandria, social service officials first began seeking Gillette's advice on clinical quandaries, which represent the bulk of his work. But over time, especially since the weakening real estate market stung the city last year, money questions have gained urgency. They now pay him a $9,000 annual consulting fee.

Second, shame on Mr. Gillette. What kind of ethicist takes money from an already failing economy to do a job that someone else was already paid to do? Even kids in elementary school know that it is unethical to give someone else the answers to the test.