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Less service, more value for our money

My Thoughts

Dr. Bill Atwood

(Updated: Thursday, February 11, 2010, 2:23 PM)

A couple of weeks ago, the President of the United States rolled out his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2011. It is a staggering $3,800,000,000,000 budget. Yes, $3.8 trillion.

Nobody can possibly comprehend the amount of money involved and yet we have grown to accept these staggering knee-buckling figures. It now seems to me that Congress and the White House consider rounding errors in the tens of millions of dollars.

I want to discuss this issue in terms that most of us can understand. This budget, if passed, would mean that the federal government will spend $120,497.21 every second of every minute of every hour of every day for an entire year. We will be borrowing about $49,000 of that amount every second. How did this get so out of hand?

Ronald Reagan was right: Businesses don't pay taxes, they simply pass them on to the consumer. It's true. The final consumer of a product pays all of the taxes that were incurred all along the way from the conception of the product to the final use.

We let the spending get out of hand because the taxes are hidden from us. We pay them in the items we buy without really knowing the cost of the government.

If we equally divided the proposed budget by all 320,000,000 of us we would each owe $11,875 to Uncle Sam. My wife and I would have to pony up a $23,750. A family of four a whopping $47,500. I'll bet that if President Obama had read that number off of his teleprompter and asked each of us to mail in a check for our share, the riots would have begun.

Let's look back at 1960. The federal budget was $92,500,000,000 and the per capita amount owed by the 180,671,158 American alive then would have been $510.26. A friend tells me that he and his wife would spend $10 per week back then for groceries and that amount included his cigarette money. It would have been difficult for the two of them to have come up with the $1,020.52 for the feds.

That is my point. Had people seen the cost of the government in one lump sum that they had to cover each year when big spender project like "The Great Society" were being proposed the rest of the nation would have said to LBJ, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Let's look at it in other perspectives. In 1960, the federal government cost $2,923.33 per second. Now the budget has increased by more than 41 times. Using the national average of a teacher's salary, which in 1960 was $5,174, a 4,100% increase would have teachers now earning on average $213,267. The current national average for a teacher's salary is less than $50,000.I think we need to start making some radical changes that will help control the spending.

First we need to insist that the budget be discussed in terms we can understand -- per capita or per second or per minute.

Secondly, we need to call things and expenses what they really are. It's welfare, not an entitlement. They are illegal trespassers, not undocumented workers. They are taxes, not fees.

Everett Dirksen stated it so well when he said that you spend a billion here and a billion there that pretty soon it added up to real money. We have spent and spent because we want so much and we want somebody else to pay for it.

Another friend reminds me that if high taxes are the cost of living here then so be it. She is right in her thinking that I would rather pay the $11,875 cost instead of living elsewhere on the planet. But I think we can get the spending under control.

By the way, each of us also owes $37,500 for our share of the national debt, which the congress just increased to allow us to borrow another $2 trillion more so it won't be long until our share is more than $40,000 each.

We, the people, need to start expecting less from the government in terms of services and more value for our dollars.

Hey brother, can you spare $11,875?