Today in Washington D. C. - April 21, 2009

Senate reconvened at 10 AM today and resumed post-cloture consideration of the nomination of Christopher Hill to be ambassador to Iraq. Following completion of debate on the Hill nomination, the Senate will vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 386, legislation designed to crack down on financial fraud. Yesterday, the Senate voted to invoke cloture on the Christopher Hill nomination and confirmed three Department of Justice nominees.

Certainly, President Obama is to be commended for looking to eliminate wasteful government spending, but his request for his cabinet secretaries to find around $100 million in savings just doesn’t measure up when we consider the crisis we face in entitlement spending and the president’s own budget. Heck, he could probably eliminate that amount running his local staff and the White House.

To quote Sen. McConnell, “Cutting $100 million in waste is good. But let’s put it in context. We’ll spend about that much every single day just on the interest payments for the Stimulus bill that Congress passed earlier this year. $100 million in savings is good, but it only amounts to about 33 cents in savings for every single American. Compare that to entitlement spending, where, in order to meet all of our current and future entitlement promises, we would have to extract $495,000 from every American household. The way I see it, there’s simply no question as to where the priority should be.”

Glancing at yesterday and today's headlines few were impressed with the savings being sought: Reuters: “White House on defensive over spending cuts”; AP: SPIN METER: “Saving federal money the easy way”; Politico: “Obama’s savings questioned”; CNN: “What cutting $100 million really means”; ABC: “Obama Asks For $100 Million in Budget Cuts: Is it Just a Drop in the Bucket?”; CBS: “Is $100M Much Of A Budget Cut? Ask Obama”; Marketplace: “Will budget cuts make a difference?”; CongressDaily: “Republicans scoff at Obama’s call for spending cuts”; Roll Call: “Obama Orders Spending Cuts, Defends Effort”; Politico: “GOP-ers mock Obama’s budget cuts”.

Indeed, the president himself acknowledged that these cuts barely scratch the surface of mountainous federal spending. According to ABC News, “Isn’t $100 million just a drop in the bucket, one reporter asked. ‘It is and that’s what I just said,’ the president said. ‘None of these things alone are going to make the difference but cumulatively, they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. So what we're going to do is line by line, page by page, $100 million there, $100 million here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money.’”

The problem: it’s hard to see just where they’ve gone line-by-line looking for cuts in an unprecedented $3.6 trillion budget proposal.

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