Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, the president is asking for your votes for the 2011 SAVE Award. To demonstrate his commitment to fiscal discipline, he set up a competition whereby federal employees can propose ways to cut government waste. A panel of experts (John Kerry, Paula Abdul, etc.) then weigh the merits, and the four finalists go up on the White House website to be voted on by members of the public: It’s like Dancing with the Czars. Last year, Marjorie Cook of Michigan, a food inspector with the Department of Agriculture, noted that every year USDA inspectors ship 125,000 food samples to its analysis labs by “next day” express delivery, and that a day or two later the labs ship the empty containers back to the inspectors using the very same “next day” service. Marjorie suggested that, as the containers are empty, they can’t be all that urgent, and should be mailed back at regular old ground delivery rates.
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But this reform was way too radical, so it didn’t win. And happily, even as we speak, mail couriers are rushing empty containers back and forth across the USDA-inspected fruited plain at your expense. This year’s SAVE Award nominees include Faith Stanfield of Toledo, a “General Technical Expert” with the Social Security Administration. As someone who’s technically expert in a very general sense, she sees the big picture. It’s on the front of the SSA’s glossy magazine. Did you know Social Security has its own glossy magazine? It’s called Oasis and it’s sent out to 88,000 SSA employees plus about a thousand government retirees. It’s like Vogue or Vanity Fair, but without the perfume and fashion ads, because who needs Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent to fund your mag when you’ve got the U.S. taxpayer? It’s the magazine that says you’re cool, you’re now, you’re living the SSA-bureaucrat lifestyle. But Faith thinks they should scrap the glossy pages and only publish it online.
Ooh, I dunno. Sounds a bit extreme to me. Could result in hundreds of Social Security lifestyle editors being laid off and reduced to living on Social Security.
Anyway, the winner of the SAVE Award gets to meet with the president to discuss his or her proposal. The proposal then gets submitted to a committee for further discussion on whether to set up a committee to discuss discussing it further. But, unlike the Superfriends’ Supercommittee, the lunch expenses are cheaper.
What with the proposal to use the nearly two centuries of budget savings from the end of the War of 1812 to fund the construction of high-speed monorails and the plan to turn the Social Security Administration’s in-house glossy into an in-house virtual-glossy, it’s no surprise that the president himself has got the deficit-reduction fever. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order “Promoting Efficient Spending” — and ending government waste. Just like that! According to Section Seven:
Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing, and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective.
Sounds like someone’s seen one amusing Janet Napolitano bobblehead too many at the DHS holiday party. About to stick in one of those giant commemorative plaques on the side of the road saying “These next three miles of single-lane scarified pavement brought to you by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act”? Don’t even think about it.
Fresh from launching the war on tchotchkes, the administration then proposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to fund a federal promotional campaign to promote the sale of Christmas trees. Possibly Commerce Department research showed that there’s a dramatic fall-off in the sale of “holiday trees” round about December 26 every year, and Obama figured a little stimulus surely couldn’t hurt. He was forced to rescind the proposal, presumably after an ACLU chum pointed out that settling the Bureau of Christmas Tree Promotion lawsuit would wipe out all the budget savings from the French and Indian Wars.
Meanwhile, as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the government of the United States continues to spend one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour, every day, every week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Ramadan.
Beggars belief. "To watch [this administration] in action is to watch the endless subordination of important long-term issues to the demands of urgent trivia."
The quote is from 'Yes Minister-- Party Games. The humour is dry and seems to have flown in under the radar for @JoeW1, but I'm sure Mr Steyn gets the reference. Maybe humour doesn't translate well.
What bad thing did we as Americans do to be cursed by the Karma God with this deaf, dumb and blind administration? And surely, whatever it was, we've paid for it by now? Maybe the savings from ending our torture will pay for the next stimulus!
"And surely, whatever it was, we've paid for it by now?"
Umm, actually that's the problem. No one alive today will be able to say it's paid for by now.
While I haven't finished reading "After America" (or as I call it "The Black Hole from Which Hope Can No Longer Enter and We Can't Escape"), what I have read makes me enjoy these relatively lighthearted columns all the more even if I do detect a slight note of sarcasm.
OK, who am I kidding. The sarcasm is part of the enjoyment.
We abandoned our responsibilities:
1) fiscal
2) familial
3) historical
4) moral
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other...........John Adams
"What bad thing did we as Americans do to be cursed by the Karma God with this deaf, dumb and blind administration?"
A good question, with a simple answer. What we did to deserve this administration was vote it in. President Obama is what Clinton and Bush were, and what Gore, Kerry, and McCain would have been--the president we deserve.
Dems are always going to push tax & spend policies so not sure why anyone would think that an appointnment to the 'Super Committee' would change that?
Maybe they're shooting themselves in the foot. As we saw with the media this week, the law of unintended consequences can work both ways ... External Link
Not sure we get to take the credit for the savings incurred since the end of the French and Indian Wars, since we were still british at the time. But I'm sure if you contact the Cameron government, they'll be happy to amortize their deficit reduction efforts since the fall of Quebec and the disbandment of Rogers' Rangers.
Of course, then you run into all sorts of problems with the indigenous poulations of "First Nations", seeing as the French and Indian wars witnessed the Last of the Mohicans. Except, of course, in that Land of Extinct Indian Tribe Casinos, Connecticut, where the Mohegans and the Pequot (wiped out in the Seventeenth Century), both have tax free havens for laundering foreign drug monies.
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