F-22, the President, and Spending Cuts

There has recently been a bit of press about how President Obama is going toe-to-toe with Congress declaring that he wants to see spending cuts! Specifically, he says that he will not sign any bill that attempts to fund the F-22 aircraft project. Now, I thought that the President was a spend-thrift? Does this spending cut action prove me wrong? Let's take a look at the details.

Well, it is true that President Obama has said the program needs to be cut and that he won't sign any bill that funds the program. It sure feels like he is wanting to cut some pork, right!?

The bill the President is referring to is a $636 billion bill coming out of Congress. Within that bill you can see the f-22 project getting funding. The price tag for the f-22 in this bill: $369 million. Our heads start to spin... millions, billions! These are numbers we never have to deal with in our everyday lives. Let's put these numbers into perspective. The President is saying that he refuses to sign a bill that funds a project worth about 1/20th of 1% of the entire bill. Let me type that again... one twentieth of one percent of the entire bill.

Does this mean that the President is a man of principle? That might seem like a plausible guess. It isn't about how much of the bill it equals, but based on the primciple of not wanting to approve wasteful bork barrel spending, he refuses to sign a bill because he objects to a line-item worth 1/20th of 1% of the bill's total worth.

Here is the problem with that. Pork barrel spending watchdogs claim that the bill contains over 1,000 porkbarrel items in it. The f-22 project is maybe one of those one-thousand items!

Ok, there goes the case for "principle" out the window. Why then is this such a big deal? Well, to you and I who will never see $369 million in our lifetimes, it IS a big deal. But in reality it is a sham of a deal, a token if you will, of what might be wrong in this situation.

If the Presidents gets his fractional cut hacked out of the bill then it will likely be heralded as a "victory for the President" and will be remembered as his move to uphold his promise to get the pork out of Congress. But now, you and I both know, this is a dog and pony show.

This is like the President allowing Congress to go into all of our wallets and at the last minute putting on a loud show, "Wait just a minute! How DARE YOU CONGRESS. Give that man back his empty wallet! How DARE YOU take his wallet from him! You can take all the cash you want from the wallet but LEAVE THE MAN HIS WALLET FOR GOODNESS SAKE!!"

If you want to see the pork out of Congress, well... HEY I am with you. But this is a show and not principle. And if you are still thinking this is a pricipled move because the President really just wants to reduce military spending, well, you have another think coming! If they pull the f-22 out of the bill he said he would sign it: The remaining $636 billion of the bill is all funding programs at the Pentagon... think again!