President Obama’s recent budget trimming efforts show just how absurdly bloated the US government is. Obama is making a big deal about trimming the federal budget by $100 million – the so-called “$100 million savings challenge.” His cabinet outdid themselves. They responded with a plan to save $102 million – or 0.006% of the deficit!

When are these guys going to stop treating the rest of us like idiots? The amount saved covers just a few hours of interest on the federal debt!

To put all this nonsense in context, imagine your family budget. Let’s say your total income is $100,000 a year. But you have over $1,000,000 in outstanding debt. That means you have so much debt that your monthly interest payments take half of your gross income. That amount is growing every year. And you’re not putting a penny towards the principle.

That’s the government’s situation – they’re bankrupt. So what do they do? They make a good faith gesture to save a few pennies in expenses.

The feds say they have achieved 77 spending cuts. The Department of Justice says it will play its part by using double-sided photocopying. The Forest Service will no longer repaint its new, white vehicles green immediately upon purchase. The Army will start packing more soldiers onto R&R flights. The Navy will delete unused email accounts.

From where we’re sitting (as far away as possible from these numb nuts), what strikes us is how vast and wasteful the government has been. Why does it take a presidential decree and a massive economic collapse to get these guys to print double-sided… or to email documents instead of printing them (another Department of Justice innovation)?

Or why, for instance, has the Office of Thrift Supervision been paying $320,000 a year for phone lines it doesn’t use? Think about it. How long has it taken you to work to pay over $320,000 in taxes to Uncle Sam?

According IRS date from 2004 (we were too lazy to hunt down more up-to-date information), the average American taxpayer reported $51,000 in income and paid $9,377 (or 18%) over to the government. That means it would have taken the average American taxpayer over 34 years to pay for one year’s worth of unused phone lines for the Office of Thrift Supervision!

If that’s the kind of waste the Office of Thrift Supervision is engaged in, imagine how much of your tax dollars other big government departments have been pissing up the wall!

We need a drink… A strong one…

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