Obama's $100 Million Question

Evan Vucci / AP Photo Sure his ratings are still through the roof. But if he can't get his own cabinet to go along with his latest budget proposal, he will go down as just another tax-and-spend liberal.

After last week’s tea party tax protests, President Obama acknowledged “a confidence gap, when it comes to the American people. And we’ve got to earn their trust.”

Democrats have been slapped with the tax-and-spend-liberal label for decades—and candidate Obama spent much time on the campaign trail trying to distance himself from that legacy. “When I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely,” he promised, offering assurance to the moderate majority of Americans that his would be an administration dedicated to fiscal responsibility.

Of course, all that was before the financial crisis and neo-Keynesian Kool-Aid started to be passed around Capitol Hill, with congressmen chugging it by the billions as the deficit ballooned.

The political skirmish over the drop-in-the-bucket of $100 million is just a preamble to a much bigger deficit-reduction fight to come—President Obama’s stated desire to pull a Nixon-in-China and reform entitlement spending.

This week, President Obama tried to square his young administration’s record with his campaign rhetoric by announcing a commitment to cut $100 million dollars in wasteful spending at his first Cabinet meeting.

Instead of receiving financial reformer accolades, the proposal was met with ridicule from the right and left, best symbolized by the smug headline on the Heritage Foundation’s blog: “Not Even Krugman is Buying Obama’s ‘Spending Cut.’”

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw created an instant classic of political comparison, by rationalizing that the equivalent would be an average American family tackling a $34,000 budget shortfall by cutting back on one cup of Starbucks’ coffee a year.

But while the ill-advised benchmark of $100 million set the president up for a political piñata news cycle by seriously underestimating the intelligence of the American people, the “waste, fraud and abuse” budget-cutting exercise is important—if insufficient.

It’s not too late to demonstrate President Obama’s seriousness of purpose—by stating that his administration’s agencies will be expected to come up with $100 million in cuts each quarter—totaling $1.6 billion by the end of his first term.

That’s not going to shrink the deficit on its own, but it will show a consistent management commitment that backs up the president’s own acknowledgement: “None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively, they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone ... $100 million there, $100 million here—pretty soon, even here in Washington, it adds up to real money.”

Obama is far from the first to campaign on cutting waste from the federal government. Presidents have made the same claims for over 100 years, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt’s Keep Commission in 1905. This was continued by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower’s Hoover Commissions, Reagan’s Grace Commission, and President Clinton’s Reinventing Government effort, which ultimately saved taxpayers $118 billion. Seen against this most recent benchmark, President Obama’s proposed $100 million in savings seems puny.