Every President promises to root it out:
Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I
pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in
office. My administration has also begun to go line by line through
the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective
programs. As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some
time. But weâre starting with the biggest lines. We have already
identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade.
In this budget, we will end education
programs that donât work and end direct payments to large
agribusinesses that donât need them. Weâll eliminate the no-bid
contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense
budget so that weâre not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we
donât use. We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our
Medicare program that doesnât make our seniors any healthier, and we
will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally
ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.
Can't wait to see the two trillion dollars of spending that we can do without. And ending education programs that don't work? Looking forward to that too. The most politically amusing moment of the evening was when Obama mention expanding charter schools and Nancy Pelosi looked lost. She wanted to clapâshe'd been clapping like a maniac all night longâbut there are limits and she couldn't bring herself to do it. Obama also mentioned "competitive" schools but I think he just meant "competitive" as in "good."
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