Do you remember, during the campaign, when Barack Obama said “They must think you’re stupid!”? What he meant to say is: “I think you’re stupid!”
The latest example is President Obama’s announcement that he will cut $100,000,000 from the federal budget. Why doesn’t he just say ”Up is down and down is up.” Nobody will question him anyway.
“That might sound like a lot to some, but if you do a little math, it turns out to be 0.0025 percent of federal spending for fiscal year 2009,” House Minority Leader John Boehner’s office e-mailed reporters.
In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was appropriate for Obama to “save millions by identifying unnecessary or duplicative government spending.” “But let’s not forget,” McConnell continued, “that at the same time they’re looking for millions in savings, the President’s budget calls for adding trillions to the debt.”
If it’s hard to put into perspective, N. Gregory Mankiw, former economic advisor to President Bush put it this way:
“To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year — approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks,” Mankiw wrote.
“The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.”
How long do you think it would take that family to go bankrupt?
Update: Even AP writers recognize the absurdity:
For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:
–Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.
–4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.
–Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.
–7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.
–1/10,000th of the government’s operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.
Obama only asked his Cabinet secretaries to identify waste in their annual operating budgets, which total a little over $1 trillion. He’s leaving out war costs, the economic stimulus measure, the Wall Street bailout and benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare.
They go on to point out how many of these so called cuts were already underway.
QUESTION: Do any libs take economics classes when they are attending college?
They sure do act superior to be so stoooooopid about basic economic principles.
I talking basics….not even close to the advanced “Chinese Arithmetic” that they use to write cough tax code cough.
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