Yesterday's Washington Wire reported that the White House was willing to accept another $4 billion in spending cuts -- on top of the $4 billion that the President has already signed into law. Later they upped that number to $6.5 billion, even though the Administration wasn't willing to detail where the additional cuts would come from. That (a) seems like progress and (b) sounds like a big number. But as Steve Moore of The Wall Street Journal mentioned during our event on entitlement reform last month, "A trillion is the new billion in Washington." So perhaps a little perspective is in order.
In a year, the federal government will spend, in rough terms, $3.7 trillion.
That works out to a little over $10 billion a day or about $422 million per hour.
So, to cut $6.5 billion, the President and Congress would have to stop spending for roughly 15 hours -- not even an entire day.
As NTUF's Demian Brady points on in The Ripon Forum an obvious place to turn for cuts is to eliminate the staggering amount of redundancy in federal programs. Perhaps if the White House were to do a little looking, they could find cuts that would equal a whole day's worth of spending or maybe even a week's worth. A billion here; a billion there. It might just all add up.