Absolutely. Well, at least that’s what Rahm Emanuel and Peter Orszag are trying to communicate in a memo to agencies asking them to find spending cuts. According to the Washington Post:

“The American people deserve a government that spends every taxpayer dollar with as much care as taxpayers spend their own dollars — where money is spent not out of inertia, but only when it contributes to achieving a clear national priority,” Emanuel and Orszag write in the memo, according to an early draft.

This, the Post writes, is on top of the freeze proposed by Obama in February. And yet the memo is clear that the sacrifice will be ridiculously small — 5 percent of the affected agencies’ budgets (the freeze, too, was applied a ridiculously small share of the budget). Even worse, half of the money saved will go to new spending rather than deficit reduction:

“To encourage cooperation, Obama also will ask Congress for new authority to let agencies keep half the savings they identify, administration officials said. The agencies could then put the cash toward higher priorities rather than surrendering it all for deficit reduction, as is typical.”

Basically, it’s as if I tell my bank “I am massively in the red, I know, and from now on I will be reasonable. See, my plan is to cut $5.00 out of the $100 I spend per week. $2.50 will go to reducing my $300,000 deficit and $2.50 I will spend on more stuff. I need a little incentive after all my efforts.”

According to the Post, though, many budget analysts around town are complimentary about the proposal. Well, I guess I am just hard to please, because I think this is a joke. The federal government is spending almost $4 trillion this year. Our deficit is $1.4 trillion. Our debt held by the public is $7.5 trillion. Our long-term entitlement deficits are huge and growing. All of these figures will be larger the next time I blog about them. I don’t have much patience for agencies that need to be given incentives to do what is right. This money isn’t theirs. It’s taxpayers’ money, and the spending needs to stop.

But then again, considering that the Deficit Commission itself needs to be bailed out by the White House, nothing should surprise me anymore. See Daniel Foster on the issue here. And speaking of commissions, my colleague Jerry Brito has a very good study on the BRAC Commission of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It just came out last month and is very informative about the likelihood that today’s Deficit Commission will succeed. A shorter version of his study is here.