http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090507/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_budget
Wow…17 billion. And the best part is that he spends this money on other programs. What happened to the idea that he was going to go “line by line” and eliminate waste?
And, if I stipulate that I think Bush wasted a lot of money, can we leave him out of this thread and focus on what the current administration has to do to get spending under control?
This seems a backhanded swat at showing Dems/Obama cannot get spending under control.
We KNOW that right here, right now, the government is going into massive deficit spending. While there is disagreement on details of how the government should spend money it is generally considered important that the government do so given the current economic crisis. It stinks, no one likes it but it is better than the alternative if we want the country to get back on its feet sooner rather than later.
Once the economy is humming along get back to me about Obama not living up to his rhetoric. I’ll be with you then if that happens.
Till then though I am not ready to bust Obama up over it.
As far as I can tell, Obama is going “line by line” and eliminating waste. He’s coming up with programs that he thinks are wasteful, and asking to eliminate them. That has nothing to do with whether he is increasing spending overall, or how he will spend the money saved. It simply means that he’s going to try to stop spending money on unnecessary, wasteful programs.
So only $17 billion on the whole federal budget is wasteful? Wow, I hope he didn’t strain himself looking too hard.
And, of course, as the media reports point out, it’s unlikely Congress will actually enact any of his “savings” since he’s picked some politically popular programs as targets. It seems like a good PR ploy to me. As soon as Obama vetoes an appropriations bill because it’s too big, then I’ll applaud him. This move is simply empty rhetoric.
He is eliminating waste and spending more sensibly. What’s the problem?
What else should he be eliminating that he isn’t? It won’t show up this fiscal year, but getting out of Iraq is a huge rediction in wasteful spending (and he’s reduced the Iraq budget down to $60 billion even in the 2010 fiscal year (down from th average of $100 billion), so there’s nice chunk of change right there.
Christ. The guy can’t win. He’s accused of spending too freely and challenged with cutting the budget, so when he cuts the budget and lessens the spending he’s accused of hosting a PR stunt.
Ok, or he could just wholesale wreck the Federal budget as some conservatives would want him to do. Let’s say he cuts $500 billion out of the budget. Congress will just put it all back, because the White House will have no credibility on what constitutes wasteful spending, just like Republicans have no credibility – to so many fiscal conservatives, the only good spending is spending on expensive weapons systems.
I’ll be surprised if Obama gets half of these cuts through Congress.
ETA: Fiscal conservatives would do well to remember that the real definition of “wasteful spending” isn’t “anything I don’t like.” There’s a big difference between spending that returns no value to the taxpayer and programs with which one has a philosophical difference, e.g., one may oppose the FDA, but that doesn’t mean the FDA is wasteful spending.
yeah, $17 billion is nothing. And as Renob has pointed out, it has to go through congress, so this is just verbal smokescreening.
This is an administration that is gearing itself up to spend more money than any of us can possibly imagine.
It’s the Dems turn to practice the “Greed is Good” card. Big money to themselves first, of course. Just like the Repubs. This country is bleeding out of every opening and the govt. is standing around with a box of band-aids.
I don’t think anyone will notice until their cable tv is out for a couple of days.
Obama isn’t spending, he’s investing.
$17 Billion is nothing. All hail Glen Beck.
I think this thread should marry page 2 of this thread
Except he didn’t cut anything. He merely said Congress should do it. The real test of his commitment to lessening wasteful spending comes when he has to sign an appropriations bill. Given the fact that he wussed out when it came to signing the pork-ladden omnibus appropriations bill for this fiscal year, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
And, Dio, I can give you a ton of things which should be eliminated in order to save money. Let’s start with the Department of Education, move onto the Department of Commerce, then the Department of Agriculture, and then we could take an axe to about half of the Pentagon’s budget, etc. Of course, my ideas may be in the minority…
And don’t count on too much reduced spending from the Iraq War. Obama’s budget proposal is pretty much meaningless. It has no effect in law. Let’s see how he does when it comes to signing the “emergency” spending bills that will be coming out of Congress this year.
What else do you want him to do? Put Marine One up on eBay or something?
He’s doing what he was tasked with. Where’s the problem?
And after we finish the fairly stupid ideas, we can start with the really bad ones.
Again, there’s not much he can do right now. When Congress starts sending him appropriations bills, though, he can veto the ones that have a ton of wasteful spending in them (by my definition, that would be every one of them, but there’s room to debate on that issue).
I’m not sure who tasked him with making meaningless budget recommendations to Congress that a) are a pittance of federal spending and b) have no chance of being enacted into law.
I’d be happy to have you defend corporate welfare (Dept. of Commerce and Dept. of Ag) and farm subsidies (Dept. of Ag).
Who is opposed to the FDA, people who don’t eat?
In this leftist crowd? I doubt it…TRM
Err…are you saying his recommendations are too few and even as few as they are Congress will balk and not pass it anyway therefore Obama should have asked for deeper cuts?
This always amazes me. if this was McCain, you’d be screaming to high heaven, but since it’s Obama, he’s just doing what he can within the confines of our system.
The problem is that there is no genuine plan to reduce spending, eliminate government programs, cut anything significant, or change the status quo.
Looking like you are doing something and actually doing something are two different things.
When are we all going to realize that it doesn’t matter, in our two party system, which one is “in”? The only thing that seems to change is “where” the money goes, but not the amount. The amount just continues to climb. And Obama & crew are not impressing me as fiscal conservatives any more than Bush & co.