Part of me is convinced that you must be kidding and the people who made the minus votes must not have gotten it. Such is the curse of a text-only medium.

he he he he. get it?

And, frankly Obama statements like this are something that those who still believe the President is a sincere person – above trying to deceive people for political purposes – need to stop ignoring.

We’ll find out that every single cent the fed gov’t spends stands between us and the abyss.

Truly, there is no end in sight at any level…so bring on the crash (or will it be slavery instead?).

3 Trillion! On the way to 6 trillion!

TARP 800 Million
2010 Budget 3 Trillion
National Debt 10 Trillion
Department Budget cuts 100 million (big news!)

If $1=1cup=8oz., then 100 million = 800 million ounces or 6,250,000 gallons. So that’s about 10 Olympic sized pools. Or, about 313 backyard pools of 20,000 gallons each.

So, 100 million is a very big number in itself.

What if 100 million=1cup?
TARP = 500 gallons
2010 Budget = 1,875 gallons
National debt = 6,250 gallons

If the 2010 Buget were a 5 gallon bucket of water, that 100 million would be 0.021 ounces as one full cup would be worth 37.5 Billion. Drop in the bucket, indeed! (Alternate snark was going to reference 2girls1cup)

Let’s go for distance now!
If the 2010 Budget were a 100 yard football field, that 100 million would be about 1/8th of an inch (about the thickness of three dimes). Each inch would equal 833 million. A long way to go!

OK, now imagine that $10 Trillion debt number!

I dunno, I’ve read some interesting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist type arguments for why the state’s debt *has* to be refuted. Basically it amounts to “The fiat dollar sucks, can’t be saved, shouldn’t exist in the first place, and besides the only way to pay off the debt is continued tax violence”.

I can certainly understand the everything-from-first-principles train of thought, but this is one area where I’m perfectly willing to let the gradualists rule the real world, as they always do anyway. Setting aside the monetary issue of bringing the dollar in for a soft landing or hard crash (the latter is clearly where we’re headed now anyway), one idea I’ve always liked is selling off gov’t assets, particularly the vast amounts of Federal land out west, to pay down the debt. Some of our overseas military outposts in particular are sitting on some rather valuable land, particularly in areas that are a good deal more prosperous now than they were when the military first set up shop there decades ago. I’d really like to see someone try to do the number crunching on how much the gov’t could get just from selling off all the surplus crap they’ll have laying around when Ron Paul gets elected or some such scenario.

The other big thing in the “mandatory” pile is interest on the debt. While it’s also changeable with statute, refusing to pay the debt would be, to put it lightly, bad.

To be fair, the term is in wide use since that’s what the government calls this spending, but there’s nothing “mandatory” about SS/Medicare/Medicaid spending. There’s absolutely nothing stopping the Congress from passing, and the President signing, a law that would cut off all of that tomorrow. All the “mandatory” aspect of the term means is that Congress and the President don’t bother including these programs in the annual budget resolution- that the spending continues under its own separate statutory authorization regardless of whether or not Congress even passes a budget. And so it’s “mandatory” only within the context of the annual budget debate that gets our friends over at Cato so agitated every year, but as my handy-dandy pocket Constitution points out “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Whether the law is the annual budget or the Social Security Act doesn’t really change the fact that the money is spent according to simple statutory law which can be changed at any time through the legislative process.