"President Obama is taking a scalpel, instead of an axe,
to the federal budget" (Mike Emanuel, FOX NEWS).
President Obama recently made a list of 121 budget cuts that would total around 17 billion dollars. While talking about his budget cuts Obama discusses the difficulties that come with budget cutting,
"For every dollar we seek to save there will be those who have an interest in seeing it spent, butat this moment--at this difficult time for our nation--we cannot accept business as usual, we cannot accept anything less than a government ready to meet the challenges of our time. But $17 billion a year is not chump change by anyone's accounting"
Although this is very true, $17 billion a year is only about .5% of the $3.4 trillion Congress approved in spending for the next year. Sen. Judd Gregg of the Senate Budget Committee is not happy about the new budget plans. "It's as if you took a teaspoon of water our of the bathtub while you left the spicket on a full speed". Sen. Judd along with many others fear the debt America is continuing to climb into will soon put us at the level of a third world country status.Now I understand that budget cuts and saving money that is needed to be spent is going to be a long difficult task. What I am concerned about is that the money that is going to be saved and cut is just going to be funneled back into other programs to increase their funding. The fact that Obama is pleased with only 121 budget cuts not even enough to cover 1% of the upcoming trillions of dollars being spent, makes me think that we are going to have a big problem, and that the "Great Recession" is going to be an issue greater than the "Great Depression".
I agree with a lot of your points on how our government's spending habits are irresponsible and down right scary to be honest. Luckily many economists believe that our recession will end by the middle of 2010. Some of the spending is probably doing extremely good things for our country like pulling us out of a recession. Although the recession ending might be in large part to Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke instead of the massive amounts of money our government has been spending. The fact of the matter is that our country is spending out of our means and until our population as a whole adopts a new mentality and ideology we are in trouble. We as the voters are responsible because we are the people that put the government officials in office. We need to be the reason politicians are scared to sign off on a three trillion dollar spending spree for the country. We need to treat our government officials like they are our children and that they better get permission from their voters before they do anything to get grounded for. The spending needs to be regulated more than it currently is and we all need to do our part to help.
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