Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) just got the news that the 2008 federal deficit will top $1 trillion dollars. His response? Be afraid. And vague. Emphasis on the vague part.

"This report should serve as a wakeup call to Congress and the country," says Cooper, who describes himself as a Blue Dog Democrat and deficit hawk in his latest press release.

"It should really scare people about the future of the economy. We must get our economy back on track in the short term, but we can only do it in a way that restores balance to our long-term budget process. I look forward to working with President-elect Obama to get a handle on our fiscal crisis. We can't afford to wait any longer."

A Little Perspective

If we were to entirely eliminate:

• $10.6 billion - United States Department of the Interior
• $10.5 billion - United States Department of Labor
• $8.4 billion - Social Security Administration
• $7.1 billion - United States Environmental Protection Agency
• $6.9 billion - National Science Foundation
• $6.3 billion - Judicial branch (United States federal courts)
• $4.7 billion - Legislative branch (United States Congress)
• $4.7 billion - United States Army Corps of Engineers
• $0.4 billion - Executive Office of the President
• $0.7 billion - Small Business Administration
• $7.2 billion - Other agencies
• $39.0 billion - Other Off-budget Discretionary Spending

We’ve still only reached just over $100 billion or one-tenth of the deficit. On we go:

• $44.8 billion - United States Department of Veterans Affairs
• $38.5 billion - United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
• $38.3 billion - State and Other International Programs
• $37.6 billion - United States Department of Homeland Security
• $25.0 billion - United States Department of Energy
• $20.8 billion - United States Department of Agriculture
• $20.3 billion - United States Department of Justice
• $17.6 billion - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• $12.5 billion - United States Department of the Treasury
• $11.5 billion - United States Department of Transportation

If we eliminate all of these departments too, we’re at $373 billion, or just over a third of the deficit. So we keep cutting:

• $70.4 billion - United States Department of Health and Human Services
• $59.2 billion - United States Department of Education

$503 billion! Halfway there...

• $515.4 billion - United States Department of Defense
• $145.2 billion - Global War on Terror

Um... that’s all that’s left. Defense and the War on Terror. And we’d have to pretty much eliminate those entirely to close the gap.

Right now we’re running nearly one-third of the entire federal government on borrowed money. That is not sustainable. That is a destined to collapse.

$1,000,000,000,000

A one trillion dollar budget deficit in 2009! The entire 2009 federal budget (as submitted by President Bush) is only $3.1 trillion! Holy crap!

That’s what President-elect Obama will inherit, thanks the President Bush’s reckless mismanagement of the federal government, taxes, and economic policy.

The AP describes it pretty well:

While nobody likes a deficit, many economists agree that heavy federal government spending—on food stamps or unemployment benefits or public works projects—may be necessary to keep economies moving in times of recession or war.

The problem is that this time Washington was racking up massive deficits even before the current economic downturn.

We can’t cut government assistance in this economy. We can’t cut anything that would result in significant government layoffs. So the deficit explodes…

If President Bush wants to do what’s best for his country, he’ll immediately start recommending specific cuts to the military budget since these are best received when they come from a Republican (the “only Nixon could go to China” philosophy). Obama, as a Democrat, can then tackle non-military spending cuts.

However, spending cuts can only get us so far. In fact, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to $1 trillion deficit. We’re not talking about trimming the fat here; we’re talking about nearly one third of the entire federal government being financed by deficits.

We’d have to eliminate one third of the federal government to catch up. It’s almost beyond comprehension what that means.

PS: Maybe President-elect Obama bought himself a little political capital on military spending cuts by keeping Gates as Secretary of Defense. If Gates gives the green light to certain cuts, that might help. Perhaps Obama understood that he need the credibility of a Republican Secretary of Defense to do what needs to be done, not just for defense spending but for bringing our troops home.