My Uncommon Sense

$3.5 trillion budget- Chump change

The House passed the $3.5 trillion budget bill this morning 233 to 193, thus sending the bill on for Senate action. To clarify the vote count, that is 233 Democrats for, and 193 Republicans against. Not one Republican representative voted for the bill. The budget plans to rack up a whopping $1.7 trillion ($1,700,000,000,000.00) in deficit this year alone, thus doubling our current deficit left over from the Bush years.

Enter the problem. We don’t have this money. We have already tripled our money supply in the past year. We have $11 trillion of debt and soon to be even more. Now I know most people don’t like numbers and they have trouble imagining the proportions of such a huge amount of money, but think about it this way: this year alone, the budget will give you, the average American, $14676.67 of debt. Note that this is 30% of the average American’s income for the year. So how will we pay for this? John Boehner, the House minority leader gives the answer:

“It puts all of this debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren,”

Rebuttal from the Democrats: *crickets*

We have no money. China basically owns us. We are now spending our children’s and our grandchildren’s money. But wait, it gets better. Obama plans to cut the deficit to $533 billion by 2013. The Washington Post explains:

Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers, said White House budget director Peter Orszag: “We will cut the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term.” The plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion by 2013, he said — still high but a more manageable 3 percent of the economy

Again, people hate math, but lets do this quickly. The tax revenue this year is expected to be less than $1.6 trillion dollars. The following year is projected to be only slightly better. Assuming inflation doesn’t kill us and that the economy rebounds, we might be able to achieve $2 trillion per year on average over the course of the next 4 years. So, if we will have a $3.5 trillion deficit by the end of this year, we need to cut the deficit by $2.95 trillion in 4 years to achieve Obama’s goal. Lets divvy it up over the 4 years. 2.95 trillion divided by 4 is 0.74 trillion. So we need to cut $740 billion out of the deficit each year on average over the next 4 years to achieve Obama’s goal. But didn’t we just say the average tax revenue would be no more than $2 trillion per year if we are lucky? So Obama must be planning to cut 37% out of each years budget? This is not feasible.

For some reason, I don’t see this happening. Maybe it is because I crunched the numbers. Maybe it is because I have half a brain. Maybe it is because I do not see our tax payers’ money as Obama does: chump change.