So President Obama has given his Cabinet members just 90 days to come up with, er, $100 million in spending cuts. Just how statistically insignificant is this amount? Cue Harvard economist and former George W. Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw:
To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum wrote about Obama's "savings" via higher taxes last month, and about Mankiw's Bush-era "gaffes" in 2004. Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy demonstrated in February how Obama's "New Era of Responsibility" and transparency was anything but, and I am still waiting for Obama's serially promised "net spending cut."
