Fiscal Nanosurgery

In the midst of so much government spending has also come a call for trying to trim the federal budget. Recently President Obama directed his cabinet to cut $100 million out of the federal budget. Within hours, pundits and politicians started making fun of his request.

After all, President Obama had already submitted a federal budget of $3.6 trillion. That works out to spending almost $10 billion a day. Put another way a cut of $100 million amounts to a cut of 28 ten-thousandths of a percent. Pundits and politicians had a field day with the request.

The Associated Press compared it to cutting one latte out of your annual budget and feeling like you have done something significant. CBS said it was like shopping for a $50,000 car and having the dealer slash the price by one dollar. Investors Business Daily called it “Fiscal Nanosurgery” and said that it was like a dietician telling you to give up one apple a year in order to abide by his diet plan.

One budget expert said that $100 million is essentially a rounding error in President Obama’s fiscal budget. It is the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes.

My reaction wasn’t to ridicule the amount but to call for more. If we could cut $100 million from the federal budget every day, we would be on our way to something significant. Yet, even if we did that, we would still have an enormous federal budget, but at least the amount would no longer be a rounding error.

One thing the pundits and politicians missed is that to most of us $100 million sounds like a lot of money, because it is a lot of money. The median family income in America is $50,000. It would take a typical American family 2,000 years to earn $100 million. Yet $100 million is merely a rounding error in our federal budget.

If Americans really began to understand the magnitude of federal spending, I think they would call for more than a cut of $100 million. Perhaps this commentary helped you to see how much the government is spending. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.