slash and burn

this is what it looks like when i cut spending

There have been many occasions in which my wife and I found ourselves in a desperate financial situation.  Money was tight and our debt began to mount.  Before we found ourselves struggling to say afloat amid the rising tide of debt (that’s a whole lot of metaphor) we had to cut our spending.

We listed out everything we spent money on monthly and placed things in three columns.  The first are things we have to spend on; rent, electricity, gas, water.  The second are things that can be cut but at great inconvenience and risk of greater financial burden; car insurance, health insurance, cell phones, internet.  The third are those which are completely expendable; cable ($100 per month), Netflix ($8 per month), and gym memberships ($30 per month).  None of these are easy to cut but somethings go to go or we would find ourselves living on the street.  And unlike the US government I don’t have China to grant me a loan.

Our government is faced with the same problem as Jaime and I.  They spent too much money on too many things and have racked up a $14 Trillion deficit.  Let me begin by giving credit where credit it due

          George W. and his “fiscally conservative” Republicans took the national debt from 6 trillion to 8 trillion in just five years.  It took ten years to raise the debt the same amount from 1990 to 2000.  So all these Conservatives who stand around now complaining about the spend happy Democrats, have their blood in the national debt as well.  I’ll be partisan and admit that it was the fear rattled Democrats who blew the whole things out of the water nearly doubling the national debt in just five years.  Thus concludes my brief and incomplete history lesson.

Now the Congressional House of Representatives just like Jaime and I, have to sit down at their kitchen table with a stack of bills, a calculator, and a yellow lined notepad and begin to make cuts.  With a $14 trillion deficit there are sure to be many cuts and most if not all will end up hurting at least one group.  I will be focusing on three specific spending cuts.  Planned Parenthood, the NEA/NEH (National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities), and NPR (National Public Radio.)

The cutting of spending for these three organizations has consumed months of debate in the House.  Naturally I assumed that because they were debated so heatedly and for so long that they must be big expenditures for the government.  You can imagine how surprised I was to discover just how much was being spent on these three organizations annually.

NEA/NEH: share about $167 Million

Planned Parenthood: about $350 Million

NPR: about $430 Million

Total: about $947 Million 

Let’s be liberal and round the whole thing up to $1 Billion annually for all three combined.

According to different estimates the government is spending between 4 and 6 Billion every single day.  If Congress was to cut all spending to each of the afore mentioned organizations then no sooner would they have saved $1 billion would they turn around and spend $4 billion.

Sure, over time saving a billion will add up, but picture this.  If we didn’t spend a dime on Planned Parenthood, NEA/NEH, and NPR for the next twenty years, then we would have saved $20 billion.  Which sounds like and is a lot of money, but when you consider that we spend $20 billion every five days... over twenty years that’s... I’m horrible at math (Let’s cut more funding for public schools) it turns out my calculator doesn’t go high enough to represent that number.

These are tough times and with such an enormous deficit many are saying that you have to start cutting somewhere.  I completely agree, a billion saved is a billion earned.  What concerns me is that amid fears of a government shutdown and weekly votes to approve stopgaps to keep from said shutdown, what has taken priority over all other expenses are these three organizations.  In order to argue this point at all I have to censor myself and not go in detail about how I really believe that the Republicans looking to cut these Liberal organizations are hiding behind government overspending in desperate times.  But I digress, if they’re going to spend this much time and energy debating $1 Billion (less than a drop in the hat).  How long will it take them to cut spending on expenditures that cost real dollars.

Whether you do or do not support these three organizations, you can’t argue that Congress has been wasting our time in this matter.  Time for which we spend $176,000 per year per Legislator.  For 435 voting members we pay approximately $77 Million per year, not to mention all the other expenses that get added on to that.  Such as healthcare, we pay for their government run healthcare, not that they feel we deserve the same in kind.  Amazingly (or perhaps not so) I’ve not heard anyone stand up and say that Congress should take a pay cut or even slash their health care all together.  After all every little bit helps, you have to start somewhere.

Jaime and I looked long and hard at our expenses.  I didn’t want to cut anything, I wanted to simply find the money elsewhere.  But just as the Republicans don’t believe in raising taxes, I had no one to raise taxes on.

The gym membership could not be cut because I was under contract.  Everything else had direct negative impact or legal ramifications.  Had the government been in charge of my budget they would have cut Netflix, it was the easiest to cancel.  We chose not to because of the importance of entertainment in our lives, and at only $8 per month the savings would be too minimal to make a significant difference.

In the end we chose to cut health insurance and cable.  They were painful cuts but they were the biggest expenses that we could actually get rid of.  They had real impact on our budget and without them we were able to keep out apartment, internet, and Netflix.  I knew that if we could be responsible and stay out of unnecessary trouble (wars) things would turn around and we would be able to get those back again.

When things did finally make that turn around we chose not to purchase cable.  As it turns out we didn’t really need it all that much.  Maybe if the government looked at themselves and made cuts that impacted their interests, they would discover that they were unnecessary as well.