Obama's Four Flimsy Budget Cutting Ideas

President Obama, in his speech on the economy, given at the Bookings Institute, once again, tried to be all things to all people. Most of the speech was aimed at the dwindling number of devotees who were anxious to hear that additional taxpayer revenues would continue to flow to favored, pet projects.

Nor were these fans disappointed, for, despite running $1.2 trillion in annual deficits, President Obama has once again promised to borrow from the future to fund yet another round of pork and dodgy projects disguised as infrastructure and green investments.

At the same time the President was busy adding more spending programs to our bloated budget, he insisted, once again, that he was committed to fiscal discipline. Obama said “We’ve combed the budget, cutting waste and excess wherever we could.” Really?

What programs have been cut and what sorts of excess were eliminated? For the curious….here goes. After several months, Obama’s OMB has released a list of the top four programs that have been identified after an exhaustive search and combing of the federal budget.

The Administration reviewed over 38,000 different ideas, to aggressively root out wasteful practices, many of them submitted by government employees. After much work, synthesis,and review, OMB announced the four cost-cutting idea finalists:

• Let veterans take home unused medications that would otherwise be thrown away upon discharge from Veterans Affairs Department hospitals.
• Allow Forest Service personnel to deposit revenue from park fees or campground passes locally rather than sending it through a unit collections officer.
• Schedule Social Security appointments online.
• Have a single inspection for subsidized housing units, even those with multiple funders.

Wow! These are Obama’s four big ideas that he cites as an example of “combing the government, cutting waste and excess wherever we could”. This is it. This is the best the Obama Administration could do.

Of course, these ideas won’t save much. At best, these projects will make a small dent in spending. At worst, these are four ideas derived from a much-ballyhooed Presidential Initiative that never intended to confront the problem of wasteful spending throughout the government, but was simply a political stunt to divert attention from bloated spending and ballooning deficits, now running in excess of $1,200,000,000,000 per year.

The career government employees who recommended these cost savings idea should not be ridiculed nor should the ideas be rejected (with a $1.2T deficit– we need to encourage innovation and cost-cutting).

But, if this list is the best we can do, the country is in real trouble.

Team Obama seems to have no ability and no desire to make a serious effort to rein in out of control government spending. Yet, on the spending side, Team Obama can conjure up new, multi-billion dollar government programs with ease. President Obama is accelerating our fiscal and budgetary collapse. If Americans were not afraid before, they should be.