After saddling the nation with trillion-dollar boondoggles like the faux stimulus and Obamacare, I’m not sure it’s possible for Obama to reinvent himself as a budget cutter before the election.
But I welcome converts, even ones that are insincere, so I’m happy he’s at least pretending to want to deal with waste and duplication in the federal budget.
Here’s a blurb from the Daily Beast about his new idea.
President Barack Obama is seeking the power to merge agencies in a bid to shrink the federal government in a sweeping move. Obama will ask Congress to give him authority to consolidate six trade and commerce agencies that have overlapping programs, cutting up to 2,000 jobs and saving $3 billion over 10 years. He’ll call for a vote by Congress within 90 days.
But I’ll definitely wait to see the fine print. After all, the President claimed in 2009 that he was directing his Cabinet to find $100 million of budget cuts.
"I hate pretending to be a fiscal conservative"
But even that trivial gesture (almost immeasurably small compared to t a$3.6 trillion budget) turned out to be empty rhetoric.
And even if he’s serious about this latest plan, $3 billion of saving over 10 years is chicken feed compared to all of his new spending.
But if you allow me to modify an old saying, a journey of tens of trillions of dollars begins with the first $3 billion.
It’s a pure campaign strategy. He wants to be able to say, “I tried to make sensible cuts and Republicans proved they care more about opposing me then about their supposed principles.” 3 billion off the baseline increases over 10 years is seriously chump change, Republicans should counter the offer with eliminating the ex-im bank and a couple of other parts of commerce and see if they can get more out of Obama’s new approach. But, as they say, a billion here and billion there and soon enough you’re talking about real money.
If the GOP is smart they will take him up on this offer without creating another incident that the liberal left can use against us.
That being said, the GOP can get a lot of mileage out of Obama making this political gesture for political gain with the American people. They should be able to publicly chastise him for making a mockery of this tiny difficit reduction.
ONe step forward aftger 100 steps back.
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