Our elected officials have pandered to the electorate for decades and gained re-election by meeting requests for funding and, when given, asking for more the next budget cycle. The federal government owes $14.9 trillion and just received an increase in the debt ceiling of $2.4 trillion additional for the next 17 months.
Try to think what 1 trillion is. Can you picture 100 of anything, coins, bricks, time? Hold your breath for 100 hundred seconds. I don’t know where to put the decimal to show a trillion.
We owe the Tea Party a debt of gratitude to slow the downhill pace of federal spending. President Obama’s February budget submission to Congress had no details of cuts and could lead to increased expenditure. It was such a joke that the Senate voted it down 97-0.
I have a problem that I blame on the media reporting, which is that we talk about cuts in budgets but where do we cut from? Is the cut from 2010 spending or a 2011 budget figure or what? What was last year’s amount and what is the new amount and what is being cut? How can we understand what is happening unless we are provided with full information?
