Oh Christ, not this shit again

Obama Tells His Cabinet to Look for Efficiency

When is $100 million small change?

When you are President Obama and you propose trimming that amount from your $3.6 trillion federal budget.

On the theory that every little bit helps, Mr. Obama convened the first cabinet meeting of his presidency on Monday and said that in an effort to make the government “as efficient as possible” and to ensure that “every taxpayer dollar is being spent wisely,” he was challenging department heads and agency chiefs to come up with ways to save $100 million over the next 90 days.

You know during the campaign when Crazy Uncle John and the Church Lady were droning on about how making government more efficient would account for all their budget holes and economic crises, it was funny. Because we knew these were the last desperate gasps of losers who, after they said it, would go back out behind the McCain Campaign Shed for a serious session of weeping.

But now Obama also thinks it's a good idea and wants everybody to pretend that a million dollar cut here on studying the migratory patterns of herons, a million dollar cut here to make those assholes at the Smithsonian use a cheaper brand of printer paper, and buying office supplies from Staples instead of Office Depot will fix everything, one efficiency at a time. Obama's mantra is "It all adds up", but no, it doesn't. As Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman points out, from his Econo-balloon floating 2 miles over Princeton, that if we cut $100 million from the budget every working day during Obama's first term, at the end of the term they'd have reduced the budget by $80 billion, or 2% of the budget for one year. "Chump change" I think is the proper economic term.

I'm all for making government more efficient, but can we do it in a manner that doesn't appear to be by picking a random number that you feel sounds good, holding the Defense Department to the same dollar amount cuts as the Department of Transportation, or pretending that this is all making some grand difference. How about just making the changes without the big empty gestures and focus group tested numbers?