Perspective on Washington Spending Cuts

Dear Editor,

It seems everyone has an opinion about the current investigations into federal government spending. Certainly everyone who pays any kind of federal taxes has a dog in this fight. I doubt anyone really thinks the hundreds of elected drunken sailors in Washington should be spending more than they already do, but there’s plenty of consternation about who’s doing what to reduce their spending, and how they’re going about doing it. 

But that’s not my point right now. Right now I want to put that spending reduction in perspective.

Let’s assume that someone or other, by one means or another, actually manages to reduce federal government spending by a billion dollars a day – every working day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, every year for the next four years. Reporters of all stripes are already claiming more than that, but for the purpose of argument let’s say it’s a nice round billion dollars a day.  

Most of us agree that $1,000,000,000 is a lot of money; however you regard it, that’s $3.00 apiece for every American man, woman, and child. Every day. And it was noted long ago that a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there eventually adds up to some serious money.

Here’s my point: Reducing or cutting or saving one billion dollars a day, for the entire four years of Mr. Trump’s term as President, will amount to only one trillion dollars.

Yes, $1,000,000,000,000 is really serious money.  But the federal budget is some 7 trillion dollars per year, and the total debt is more than 36 trillion – always increasing.

I’ll not try to prescribe how spending should be cut, or how that might reduce the terrible federal debt, but it’s obvious a mere billion dollars a day isn’t going to do the job. Interest alone on the present debt is about three billion dollars a day – every single day of the year, weekends included. That’s more than four billion in interest every working day.

So, as incredible and desirable as a billion dollars a day in spending reduction may sound, that doesn’t even begin to cover the interest on the national debt, let alone being any real money-in-the-bank savings on our behalf. The ones doing the cutting of spending have a long way to go before it makes any real difference to those of us who provide the money that’s being spent.

Fifty years ago I regularly told my math and science students at Tennessee Temple College that our country would be better off if we’d simply give every elected person in Congress an unlimited supply of real paper dollar bills to dispense. Within the legitimate limitations of government business, Representatives and Senators could spend all they want to spend on whatever they want to spend it on – but they had to count out every single dollar manually. Not their staff, no interns, and no bureaucrats; the elected ones must do it all by themselves, one dollar bill at a time.

That’s not as ridiculous or careless as it sounds. There are not quite 32 million seconds in a year, and we know how loath the people in Congress are when it comes to ordinary forty-hours-a-week work. Make your own estimate as to how much each of those 535 people could spend on that basis; it’ll be way less than they invariably manage by simply writing big round numbers on checks.

Well, that’s my humble perspective on this one detail in the headlines. The new White House people have made a start – they’ve taken that first small step on our behalf. But it’ll be decades before they begin to chip away at the principal of the federal debt, and even longer before there’s any justification to begin sending any of us refund or dividend checks.

So, as Great-grandpa used to say, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!”

Larry Cloud

Lookout Valley, Tenn.