Excerpt:
President Obama’s budget director Jack Lew in a Sunday opinion piece outlined some off the “tough choices” Obama is willing to make to cut spending in his 2012 budget request due out on Feb. 14.
The piece details cuts that affect initiatives dear to the president: programs to help the poor and to clean up the Great Lakes near the president’s home state of Illinois.
The cuts are relatively small, however, in the larger scheme of things. In total, the $775 million in detailed cuts fall far short of demands by congressional Republicans and will do little toward tackling the deficit, which is estimated to be $1.5 trillion this year by the Congressional Budget Office. The cuts are in addition to a five-year spending freeze which the administration says will save $400 billion over the next decade.
[…][Lew] said “this cut is not easy for” Obama.
The 2012 deficit is projected to be 1,500,000 million. TWELVE TIMES what the last Republican budget was back in 2007, when unemployment was at 4.3%. Government spending means taking money away from productive workers and from the businesses that hire those productive workers.
To see a graphical representation of the cuts as a portion of the entire budget, click here. The cuts cannot be seen with the naked eye, so the there are several images in that post, each one more zoomed in than the last.
WINTERY KNIGHT 