2011 Federal Budget Deal
Federal Budget: $3,820,000,000,000 (3.82 Trillion)
Income: $2,170,000,000,000 (2.17 Trillion)
New Debt: $1,650,000,000,000 (1.65 Trillion)
Amount Cut: $38,500,000,000 (38.5 Billion) – about 1% of the total budget.
National Debt Total: $14,271,000,000,000 before this year’s budget.
Harry Reid is calling this a “historic amount“. The President said it is a “historic deal”. John Boehner simply said, “We’ve come to an agreement”.
Let’s Put This In Perspective. It helps me to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to.
Let’s remove eight zeroes from those numbers and pretend this is a household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
Amount of money the “Jones’s family spent this Year: $38,200
Total income for the “Jones’s family this Year: $21,700
Amount of new debt added to the credit card this Year: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
New outstanding balance on credit card: $159,210
So last week, the “Jones’s” sat down at the kitchen table and agreed to cut $385 from their yearly budget. A historic amount!
Thank you to Bobby Cox for sending that to me. However, none of you should be discouraged by the ridiculous deal or the outlandish rhetoric coming out of Washington. When Harry Reid makes such insulting comments as “…the Cap, Cut, and whatever plan…,” sounding more like a spoiled teenager than a U.S. Senator (my apologies to the teenagers, the ones I know say far more intelligent things), take heart that you are getting under the skin of the ideologues who are watching their utopian fantasy crumble beneath them like the house of cards it has always been.
This is the beginning of a long struggle. The first shots fired in a war rarely have great impact, but the enemy of our republic knows that we mean business. We’re not just a bunch of flag waving grandmothers complaining about taxes. A point I often make, in fact, is that our complaints have been far more focused on spending and the size of government, not taxes. But, for the first time since Reagan, congress is focusing on reducing the deficit instead of increasing it. In two years we went from National Health Care, the most costly and damaging piece of legislation most of us have ever seen, to a game of “who can show the biggest cuts.” Sure, most of the “cuts” are fantasy at best, but no one is trying to nationalize another component of our private sector.
I urge you to read this column in the American Spectator. We must stand firm in our resolve. The time to surrender is not when we’ve got them on the run.
