Sunday, May 10, 2009

Obama goes "line by line" through the budget ...

... and saves a whopping half a penny for every dollar of spending. The Wall Street Journal reports on this mighty feat of Obama style thriftiness:
President Obama unveiled a budget Thursday with a 2010 price tag of $3.5 trillion financed with $1.2 trillion of new debt. For domestic agencies, that's a 9.3% spending hike over last year.

Mr. Obama and his advisers know the public won't accept gigantic governmental expansions without at least some effort to pare the waste in Washington. So they scrubbed "line by line" through this historically huge budget and identified $16.7 billion of budget savings. This is less than a penny, about 0.47 cents, of savings out of every dollar Uncle Sam will spend this year. And these aren't real savings that will reduce debt, because Congress has already fixed the budget totals. Thus, each dollar saved from the African Development Foundation gets reallocated to some other foreign aid program.

Read the article here. So when President Obama talks about "shared sacrifice", remember, he doesn't mean the government, just you.

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