Remember when $100,000,000 was a lot of money?

Hoping to convince Americans that he's fiscally sound (Ha!), Barack Obama convened his Cabinet and asked them to cut $100 million from the budget.  (Link to story here.)

Obama's hoping that that nice big round number impresses you and me.  Now $100 million used to be impressive.  It is still a little more than a successful blogger makes for his work but compared to the $3.6 TRILLION budget that Obama has proposed for 2010, even he admits that $100 million is no more than a "drop in the bucket."  Frankly, that's even a rosy overestimate . . .

The federal government's deficit for the MONTH of March, 2009, was $192.3 BILLION.  That's one month.  And Obama's "challenge" to his Cabinet is to cut "roughly one-twentieth of 1 percent" from that figure.  

One-twentieth!  

Of 1%!  

Of one-month's overspending!

Andrew Taylor and Calvin Woodward at the Associated Press pointed out that what Obama asked his Cabinet to do is equivalent to cutting a cup of coffee or two out of your household's annual budget.  It is like trying to save $6 from a family's $60,000 budget.  The cuts would be only 1/10,000 of the Cabinet secretaries' collective annual operating budgets (excluding war costs, the so-called stimulus, various bailouts, and entitlement programs).  And the interest on the "stimulus" alone with cost almost $100 million a day, every day, for the next 10 years!  (Link to their story here.)

Time to dump some more tea?