THE LUNATICS ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM:
Is anyone else tired of our Sequester-Jester president? I mean, wtf? Complaining of having to cut bloated government spending by anywhere from 1% to 2%, depending on whether you believe the Congressional Budget Office (1%) or the rhetoric of politicians (2%), would be comical if it weren’t such a problem. It’s a drop in the federal bucket and less than every working American was forced to cut when the payroll tax jumped up by 2.5% in January. Of course less than half of Americans are actually working, so pass on news of the hardship to the person hanging out at the beach while taking in money from Unemployment and Disability Insurance.

Workers seem to be surviving the payroll cut, although it made me cancel a trip to tour the White House.

How is it we were able to keep the drunks in the airport towers, the TSA gropers yawning at airport check points stealing watches from travelers and our precious parks open when federal spending was $1 trillion less five years ago when Bush was president, not exactly a spendthrift president?

Notice spending was noted and not the word “budget.” This is because we haven’t had a legally required budget for more than four years. The real unspoken truth is neither party has wanted to be constricted by a budget, opting instead to work on continuing spending resolutions in which any reduction to an increase in government outlays is met with howls of recrimination.

The federal spending baseline includes the nearly $1 trillion is stimulus spending that didn’t work when it was put out in 2009. Now, in effect, we spend the same $1 trillion on stimulus each year and it still doesn’t work. In addition, the Fed is pumping $1 trillion per year into the economy by buying unwanted Treasuries, which is keeping the markets artificially high and on the precipice of a meltdown when it eventually has to stop its easing program.

Our spending is at an all-time high of $3.8 trillion and is adding to our already massive debt of $16.5 trillion (just to make a point, the GDP for the U.S., which is the total of all goods and services in our country, is only $15 trillion). Additionally, and unspoken, our unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare are estimated by some to be as much as $90 trillion. While it’s easy to get lost in numbers, the simple fact is the government is taking in more money than ever before and every level of it, federal, state and local, is out of money and running a huge deficit. I’m not sure how anyone can say we don’t have a spending problem when looking at such a disparity in inflow versus outflow.

The obvious question is where to reduce the increase in spending. Understanding it’s far too painful to cut $2 million to study the sex lives of snails (true story) or $200 million in aid to Pakistan and a like amount to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, maybe there are other places the feds can look to without encountering the sound of skewered pigs. The CBO produced a study that says there’s $125 billion per year in wasteful federal spending and another $250 billion per year in duplicative programs. The CBO didn’t do the study on a whim, it was asked to do so by Congress. What’s the point of Congress asking if the members are going to tuck away the answers?

In looking to reduce anywhere between $44 billion - $88 billion a year in spending because of the sequester, maybe the spenders can take a gander at the CBO study and start at the wasteful spending or duplicate spending areas. Unless that’s too much like shooting fish in a barrel and all involved want to really earn their money. Or perhaps they want to make cuts to more public programs while in a bout of an impish tantrum because the cuts have to be made at all.

How long has it been since the public had trust in the government to spend our tax dollars wisely? Maybe the answer to that says it all.