Obama Proposes $17 Billion In Cuts

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama announced he had asked his Cabinet officers to trim $100 million from their budgets. At the time, it was ridiculed as merely a symbolic gesture -- an insignificant drop in the bucket when compared to the federal budget as a whole. That was true.

But now the President has proposed about $17 billion in cuts to the federal budget. That won't come near balancing the budget, but it has to be considered a significant cut. With the economy shrinking and job losses piling up to nearly 9%, this is not the time to consider trying to balance the budget. This is the time to for government to spend in an effort to get the economy jump-started again.

But that does not mean cuts cannot be made. There are programs duplicating services, programs that are not working and programs that simply are not needed. These programs are not only wasting government money, but they are doing little or nothing to stimulate the economy. They can and should be cut.

Once the country's economy is back on its feet, this will just make it less that has to be made up to re-balance the budget. President Obama is proposing cutting or eliminating about 121 programs -- half from the discretionary budget and half from the military budget. I think this is a wise move by President Obama, and the cuts should be made.

But now comes the hard part -- convincing Congress to actually do it. It's easy to talk about making cuts, but the fact is that every cut made will affect some senator's state and some representative's district. Bad program or not, these elected officials will not want to see money going to their constituency cut, and sadly, it probably doesn't matter if they're Republicans or Democrats.

This is a time for the elected officials from both parties to do the right thing, and show some political courage. Will they do it? I hope so, but neither party has shown much of this in the last few years.