Change or Pocket Change?

I demand $100 million in savings!

So times are getting tough and families need to cut back on expenses.  Some are not buying “organic” food anymore, switching instead to that unhealthy stuff in the produce isle of Safeway.  Others are maybe getting a 42″ LCD television instead of that 52″ model they wanted.  It seems this new thriftiness has swept into President Obama’s thinking, too.  That’s why he asked his cabinet secretaries to find, out of their $1 trillion budget savings of… wait for it… $100 million!  And the best news is that they have up to 90 days to figure out how to do it!

The Associated Press has some interesting examples as to how this will be accomplished:

Will buying multipurpose office equipment, such as a combined copier, printer, fax and scanner all in a single unit instead of separate units, really save the Homeland Security Department $2 million a year over five years?

The White House estimates savings of tens of thousands of dollars from freeing up warehouse space stashed with obsolete equipment that had been used by a federal entity few people have heard of, the Bureau of Information Resource Management.

The White House says Homeland Security, the third largest federal department, has not been buying most of its $100 million a year in office supplies in bulk.

The administration thinks it can save $52 million over five years with bulk-buying bargains at the department.

When asked about the paltry savings President Obama said the following:

“None of these things alone are going to make a difference, but cumulatively, they would make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone.”

I’d have to say, with all due respect to President Obama, that when he signed the $787 billion stimulus bill (the biggest one ever) into law and he claimed there were no “earmarks” in it (although everybody knew otherwise) that this would have been a better way to “set a tone.”

Use this multifunction printer, save $2 million per year!

Perhaps some would say this article is an example of picking a small, insignificant event and blowing it into something it’s not.  I would respond to this line of thinking by saying that it simply goes to show the mentality of the Obama administration when it comes to spending.  Former President George W. Bush rarely saw a spending bill he did not like and he certainly helped to blow up the deficit, something which I feel did damage to this country, however Barack Obama campaigned as somebody different who would being new thinking to the White House.  Instead, it seems, we have somebody who stole hundreds of billion of dollars from future generations and now offers a paltry amount back in the form of “savings.”

Investor’s Business Daily put it best when they gave some analogies to Obama’s big plan to “save” taxpayer monies:

So to get a real sense of just how little is being asked of his Cabinet, consider:

• If Obama were your dietician, you’d only have to give up an apple a year to abide by his diet plan.

• If he wanted you to cut your gasoline consumption, you’d have to drive just one-third of a mile less in a year.

• And if he wanted you to waste less water, you’d only have to reduce the time you spend in the shower on one day of the year by 30 seconds.

While I always wish to encourage politicians to cut spending as much as possible, this proposal by President Obama really seems like some kind of a farce.  The trouble is, the joke’s on us.

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