May 14, 2009

Want to Call Federal Spending ‘Investments,’ Mr. President? Let’s Do It For Real

Boy, that Barack Obama is a sharp one.

No sooner was the virtual ink dry on my recent column jumping all over the world’s most famous deficit dove for his paltry $100 million in program cuts (0.0029 percent of his $3.9 trillion budget) than he released a spending blueprint that hiked the hit list all the way up to $17 billion – or a whopping 0.50 percent of his record spending total!

The president even dragged forth as a sacrificial lamb a tiny educational grants program that spent 80 percent of its budget on administration! I can picture it now: “That’ll show ‘em I can make the tough calls.”

Caught me lookin’ there, Mr. President. Froze me with a 12-to-6 Uncle Charlie over the outside corner. I’ll bet Robert Gibbs, in between putting out fires over Joe Biden flu gaffes, Air Force One flyovers and Rush Limbaugh death wishes, was guffawing until his sides split at how your humble and humbled columnist was publicly hung out to dry. (What? I’m not in the White House daily clips?)

So OK, Sleek Barry. Two can play this game. I’ll see your $17 billion – and raise you $3.883 trillion.

Say what? Yeah, you read that right. I’m upping the ante. If you’re really serious about your “line-by-line” review of the budget, let’s cut it all. Set spending at zero. And then let’s start over.

If you truly want to impress me, here’s what I expect to see: Every last ornament on your Christmas tree of a federal budget having to be polished up, explained and justified on a cost-benefit basis. Every little piggy at the taxpayer trough squealing for its supper. Every paper clip and paper pusher covered by the $400 billion omnibus bill, every banker’s bonus and “legacy asset” in the $700 billion TARP, and every bike path, nature center and boardwalk boondoggle financed by the $800 billion stimulus boondoggle approved de novo.

Yeah, I mean Social Security, Medicare and even Pentagon spending too. Every nickel. All 78,000,000,000,000 of them, give or take.

You want to call federal spending an “investment?” Fine with me. Let’s treat it the way the private sector would handle not only its cap ex, but also its operating budget.

The managers of every single federal program must come before an Investment Review Board and beg for another year of my beneficence as “owner.” With clear objectives to be reached, strict standards of performance to be met and proven benefits and value to the “shareholder” – once again, moi, and an unimpeachable demonstration that no one anywhere in the private sector can do the job or that the initiative shouldn’t be financed at the state, county or municipal level where there will be greater transparency.

Mr. President, let’s see how much of that $3.9 trillion whale of yours meets that test. Methinks we’ll be slimming the blubbery beast down to orca size or so in a fortnight.

This idea of “zero-based budgeting” isn’t new. Another Democratic president, one James Earl Carter, nailed it in place as a veritable pillar of his platform. His commitment to the cause lasted maybe 443 days fewer than the Iranian hostage crisis. It didn’t even make it to the cardigan speech and the “Moral Equivalent of War” (MEOW).

But this time, let’s get it right. Just as Disneyland wasn’t built in a day, I recognize that the colossi the Gipper called “puzzle palaces on the Potomac” can’t be rehabbed in a single fiscal year. I prefer a two-year cycle anyway – as opposed to the less than two-day cycle you allowed for the stimulus – to maximize planning and review and minimize books-cooking and brinkmanship.

So, Mr. President, I’ll give you until next year to get every Department, Agency, Bureau, Office and Commission cooking on those PowerPoints, Excel sheets, graphs and charts (four colors, of course). And they had better be good.

Show me up, will you?