The Big Bucks

July 7, 2002

by Brian W. Peterson

The federal budget is monstrous. It’s big. It’s humongous. It’s, it’s - where’s my Thesaurus? It’s stinking big. To understand the budget is equivalent to giving every blood cell in your arteries a name, then calling each cell by name as they pass through your heart. It’s complex, thick, and many-faceted. Anything “many-faceted” has got to be hard to understand.

Think of it this way: the federal budget is slightly over $2 trillion - well, slightly if you call $52,320,000,000 slight. The budget is $2.052 trillion. If you were to take 2.052 trillion one-dollar bills and stack them end to end, you could snarl traffic for days as people tried to grab all of those dollar bills lying around all over the place. The stack would be a big messy pile real quick.

There is not a whole lot of “discretionary” spending where we can cut when compared with the entitlements. Entitlements include Social Security, Medicare, and guaranteed low fares the next time you feel like derailing on an Amtrak trip. Derailments are not cheap, you know.

Actually, Amtrak is part of the discretionary segment of the budget. In Fiscal Year 1999 (Fiscal Year is usually abbreviated “FY,” which can be an abbreviation for something else quite apropos for taxpayers), Amtrak received $243 million in funding. In FY 2002, that number jumped to $854 million. From FY 2001 to FY 2002, we spent 54% more for federalized train wrecks.

I tried to figure out the percent increase from FY 1999 to FY 2002, but the battery on my calculator ran down when I punched in the numbers.

When compared with 2.052 gadzillion dollars, $854 million seems so small and insignificant. Imagine, a measly 854 million one dollar bills. Passing motorists would see 854 million dollars stacked end to end and they’d yawn.

Another budget saver would be to quit funding PBS. That would save $375 million. In a few paragraphs, I just saved taxpayers over a billion dollars.

But a billion dollars is chicken feed. Give me time and I’ll probably find chicken feed somewhere in the Agriculture Department’s budget.

We have an extraordinary amount of television channels available on cable and satellite television. My TV box goes up to at least Channel 850 - I am sure of that. I know what number to dial for many of my favorite channels. I have no idea what number to punch into the remote for PBS, but I know that I pay for it. My tax dollars don’t go to ESPN or the History Channel, but they do for a network that just happens to advertise at the beginning of programs rather than in the middle.

Saving $375 million may not sound like a lot of money for those of us who make the big bucks, but it does seem like enough worth saving.

We could save $238 million by eliminating the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. We pay for people to do things that no one would pay with their own money to seem them do. Axe them. Get rid of them. Let them create art the old fashioned way: hanging upside-down from the ceiling… paid by the bucket.

By the time that I got to the Treasury Department’s budget, I had new batteries in my calculator, but my eyes were so overwhelmed by all of these numbers I couldn’t tell how much money we would save by eliminating the one-dollar bill.

Judging by how often my wife wags soggy one-dollar bills at me while she taps her foot and firmly plants one hand on her hip, we could probably save a lot of money by not having to make new dollar bills all the time. There are a lot of those buggars out there in circulation, and lots that end up in washing machines.

We could follow the lead of Canada. Following the lead of Canada certainly isn’t an expression that you hear very often - unless you like hockey - but their “Loonies” ($1 coins) and “Twonies” ($2 coins) are pretty cool. Unlike the US, they have made their coins quite different in size than quarters. Of course, the Canadian quarter isn’t worth a quarter.

Ah, there are so many ways to save money but so little time. It’s just too bad that all of the above is small change. Now eliminating the entire Executive Branch, that’s where the big cash savings can be found.

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Brian W. Peterson writes a political column for the Antelope Valley Press (circulation approximately 60,000) in Palmdale, California. He is a graduate of Oral Roberts University, where he majored in TV/Film. Brian’s weekly commentary and newspaper columns can be found at www.LifeAndLiberty.com.

Send the author an E mail at Peterson@ConservativeTruth.org.

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