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Refurbishing The Kitchen
Or How To Bankrupt America by James Glaser February 1, 2010 So, Wanda and I have been thinking about refurbishing our kitchen. Now, I'm not talking about a total redo of the room, but enough to make it look new again and change what we see every day in there. We are thinking about a new wall covering, new light fixtures, a new stove, and new handles and knobs on the cabinet drawers and doors. Maybe we can even make some changes to the inside of the cabinets with those shelves that slide out so you can get at things more easily. Well, we started adding up how much everything might cost, and we came up with, as close as we can figure, $2,600.00. Not really that much, but more than we wanted to spend. So, we decided we would have to pare things down a bit to a more reasonable number. Wanda decided she would be the one to make the cuts, and soon she came back to me with what she thought was a sizeable reduction, but it turned out that she had lowered our cost by twenty bucks—that's less than one percent! Well, twenty dollars didn't even seem like a dent, so I said I'd give it a try. By the time I finished slashing and cutting costs, looking for the best deals on everything we wanted, I had cut our total by $650.00. I don't know if it was psychological or not, but getting down below two grand made our budget seem about right. On top of that, we both felt good about cutting our budget by 25%. Now, America and President Obama are trying to cut down their budget, too. Last year, the United States spent $2,600 billion dollars. Another way to say that is $2.6 trillion dollars. We know 54% of that money goes to military spending. That adds up to $1,449 billion dollars plus. The non-military spending, the other 46%, adds up to $1,210 billion dollars plus. These are numbers are huge, and that is our problem. Our country is in trouble, because we are spending more each year than we take in with taxes. President Obama wisely decided that we had to rethink the budget, much like Wanda and I thought about what we were spending on the kitchen. He looked at all the money going out, and started thinking about what was necessary and what we could pare down. The President looked high and low, but could he only could find $20 billion dollars to cut out of the budget. Now that is a less than 1% savings, and if you are only going to save 1% on something you can't afford in the first place, are you even trying? Like I said, one of the reasons President Obama is looking to cut the budget is that we are spending more than we have . This has been going on for a long time, and because we are spending so much we have to borrow the short fall. That means we have to pay interest on the debt we are accumulating. Look, our debt is so huge and unmanageable that we had to create and fund a Federal department called, "The Bureau of the Public Debt." Unbelievable. Anyway, the BPD tells us this:
Just think of all the savings there would be if we had no public debt. Hmm, come to think of it, with no debt, we could cut out the Bureau of Public Debt totally. But, I digress. Let's get back to President Obama and his search to cut our budget. A 1% cut is almost no cut at all when you realize just how far in debt we are. We owe trillions and trillions of dollars, and cutting a measly $20 billion is about what we spend every month on interest payments just to stay even. It is like America is buying a house and making interest-only payments. We never even touch the principal, and in truth we add to that principal every year, so we keeping digging a deeper hole for our children and grandchildren to pay off. So, President Obama's $20 billion in savings is not going to save America. He needs to bite the bullet and make real cuts. Wanda and I needed to cut 25% out of our budget to make us feel good about our spending, and that is what America has to do, too. Oh, maybe not 25%, but some where close to that amount is needed for the next couple of decades to get us back on an even keel. In President Obama's State of the Union speech, he talked about how well Chinia and Germany were doing, but he failed to tell us that they don't spend even close to what we do on our military. Heck, many claim we spend more on our military that the rest of the world combined spends on their military. Our military spending has made us the greatest debtor nation on the globe, and that is a fact. Even knowing that, President Obama has said we can't touch military spending. That said, we will go bankrupt if we don't make some serious cuts across the board, and those had cuts better start soon. Now President Obama has the right idea in cutting spending, but it is pretty disingenuous to only come up with less that 1% in savings, and then claim he is being fiscally responsible. Here is how Reuters put Obama's so-called search for savings:
There are tens of thousands of items in the budget of the United States. That the President Obama and his team could only find 120 of them that were not critical to the existence of America is hard for me to believe. Back to mine and Wanda's kitchen—if President Obama were helping us make cuts to our kitchen budget, he would have cut it by only $20 dollars. Our twenty dollars is equivalent to his $20 billion savings on the budget. Pretty pitiful cutting. I didn't let Wanda get by with it, and neither should we let him.
Wanda would want me to tell you that the story about our kitchen project is fiction, and that is not true about her only finding twenty dollars in cuts. Our kitchen project, and many other home improvement projects are on hold. There are lots of things we want to do to the house but with the nation's economy in the mess it is in, now is not the time to be putting money into a depreciating asset. |
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