President Obama has tasked his cabinet to come up with $100 million in savings this year starting in the next 90 days.
Its about time.
$100 Million is a lot of clams. You can buy 3,000 Prius Hybids and replace a whole rent-a-car fleet with green machines of that car class. You could retire almost 1,000 mortgages in the US, pay them down to zero, based on the government's numbers on what the average mortgage load is on Americans. You could freely supply 30,000,000 school breakfasts to kids.
$100 Million is a lot. But when you compare it to the federal budget of 4 trillion. there is a difference.
In the 1950's C. Northcote Parkinson developed some economic observations into the lofty realms of 'laws'. One of them is the point of vanishing interest. Parkinson's examples were based on the amount of time school committees and town meetings would spend on line-items of different amounts. Invariably Parkinson found that an inordinate amount of time would be spent on the prices of swing-sets and not much of time was spent on big ticket items (facilities, salaries, fuel etc.). His accepted reasoning was that people understood swing-sets and more importantly understood the scale of money for a swing-set. It was a number that they could wrap their heads around. The larger sums, say a discussion between a $4.2 million line item and its alternative of say $4.4 Million would scarcely gather the same time and passion, even though the $200,000 difference dwarfed the swing-set budget by 10:1. The big ticket items that the School Department backed , were usually the ones that carried the limited discussion and were voted in. The people's point of vanishing interest had been reached.
So, $4-Trillion spending vs a $100-Million saving. What does it look like.
If you call 4-trillion BIG and 100-million SMALL, then we could divided BIG by SMALL to see how many SMALLs are contained within the BIG.
In this case there are 40,000 SMALLS inside this one very big BIG
In other words, for every $40,000 dollars that the feds spend this year, Obama is asking his Cabinet to find a $1 saving...that's one-dollar. In human scale, its a guy making 60K (40K after taxes) with the will-power to bank that $1 and not buy that one pack of tic-tacs next month or any other month.
If you look at the daily interest payment on the huge stimulus and omnibus spending bill of this year, that number is $89,400,000 per day in interest. Obama is asking his cabinet to find about 1/365 of that cost for this year.
Even though its a start, don't give the feds a Hallelujah quite yet on reducing the spending (my kids are on the hook for $345,000 of payments to China et al., over their lifetimes...assuming we don't pile up any more unfunded deficits)