President Obama convenes his cabinet today and will ask for $100 million dollars worth of cost cutting to be delivered within 90 days. Last month, both houses approved the President's $3.5 trillion budget outline to be fine tuned and finalized later this year.
Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.
To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year. Click on the title above to access an article about the budget battles.
You know I wasn't really a huge fun of either political party that ran in the presidential election simply because I thought people were praising the candidates for the wrong reasons (people liked Obama purely because of the color of his skin and people liked McCain because he was a Vet and had a female vice-president). It seemed stupid to me but now seeing that Obama is actually changing America a few steps at a time is impressive. Unless other presidents who just say things and are unable to follow through, Obama is doing what he set out to do. He's making government budget cuts (although Very small, something is better than nothing) and is putting the credit card companies on trial. People with those companies that cheated out many Americans knew what they were doing and were sneaky about the interest rates. They knew people wouldn't sign up for them if they truly knew what they were contracting themselves for. However, in the defence of those companies they did put it in print and it was a risk of the customer to sign without reading the fine print. I can understand being tricked but if you see that's something's wrong don't wait until you go bankrupt to change it.
ReplyDeleteSince the beginning Obama made me feel confident about recovering from this economic crisis and I do think that he's doing what he can in this moment to do it, so I believe that people are being to hard with him by criticizing him right now just after being officially in office for 3 months. We knew at the time of the election that the situation was going to get worse and as the months passed we saw that going out from the huge hole we were entering could be a very long process so I don't understand why people are being so pessimist instead of trying to do what they can to help. Right now I'm still confident and I think others must try to do the same and realize that trying to cut costs can be a good step that may lead to other better steps.
ReplyDeleteMichael Shep:
ReplyDeleteObama has been very busy in his first 100 days and he is moving the economy. Doing something is better than doing nothing and if that something is cutting .0003% of the plan than that is what he intends to do. Obviously what Obama has been doing is working because the economy has changed for the better and whether it was the lame duck syndrome or not...Bush just can not compare to Obama's activeness in the White House.