100 Million = Bread Crumbs

Andrew Sullivan thinks that yesterday's request from President Obama is a fair response to the various tax/tea rallies from last week:

Yeah, it was pathetic in the grand scheme of things. But I thought it was a good sign that Obama understands totally valid concerns about future debt. If the tea-parties did nothing but remind Washington that many people out there do care about deficits and debt and spending - and rightly so - then you can almost forgive the opportunism and shrillness and amnesia about the last eight years that came with them. Still, it's only fair to give Obama some lee-way during his first year on long-term entitlement reform. He's pledged to tackle it, and better to keep him to that than to lob bombs and throw hissy fits right now.

I agree with Sullivan in a few ways, although I would be lying if I didn't scoff outright on the President's taking such spending cuts as serious. Andrew is also right is scoffing at the tea-parties sudden, blistering outrage over spending. Perhaps it is a good thing that Obama is at least acknowledging this outrage. It still seems, however, that his presidency remains a well run public relations operation. The fact of the matter is that this spending cut does little, if anything, for the American public.

Obama most likely understands that this anti-tax rhetoric is more than simple anti-left sentiment. People are scared--not only about the jobs they've lost, the mortgage they can no longer afford--that their government might start handing out money like tic-tacs with little if any real conception of how it might me utilized let alone restricted in the future. People don't hate entitlements. They hate entitlements that don't go away.

Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw Provides this analogy:

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.