President Obama sent his budget for fiscal 2011 (starting next October) to Congress today. As you’ve probably heard, his budget proposes to spend about $1.3 trillion more than will be collected in taxes, and this less than a week after his State of the Union pledge to freeze spending and do more belt tightening throughout the government. It takes a true believer indeed to keep from losing faith when confronted with that apparent  inconsistency. The Tea Party must be collecting converts tonight as fast as they can sign them up.

Just for grins, I thought I would dig a little deeper into the proposed federal budget, and make a stab at balancing it myself. My only rule is that the budget must actually be balanced; that is, expenditures cannot exceed tax collections.

First, what kind of money do I have to work with? The Office of Management and Budget (the source of all my figures) estimates total tax collections of $2.57 trillion for FY ’11.  By the rules of the game, I can’t spend more than that.

Now for expenses. Medicare and Medicaid are by far the biggest expense, and are traditionally “untouchable.” They will cost $1.43 trillion. I’ve got $1.14 trillion left. (This isn’t going to take long, it seems.)

Social Security payments are expected to be $730 billion.  $410 billion left. I have to pay the interest on the national debt, lest the government default. That’s going to cost $251 billion.

I now have $159 billion for everything else. I think I’ll just throw it in a hat and let the Defense Dept. and Homeland Security fight it out. Either way, I don’t look soft on defense.

Done.

On the other hand, I note that even left wing, bleeding heart Obama wanted to spend $744 billion on defense. So perhaps I’d better do a little jiggling.

For starters, I’m going to throw out Medicaid. After all, people need to stand on their own two feet. I pay taxes; why can’t they? That gets me back a whopping $570 billion dollars! And it’s time to reinstate those higher income taxes on the rich – push the maximum tax bracket back to 39%. That gets me another $90 billion. Add back in the $159 billion surplus and I now have $819 billion to work with. I can pay for the defense budget and still have $75 billion left over to fund the rest of the government.

What is the rest of the government, by the way? What are those discretionary programs which we don’t really need but the liberals love to tax us for, anyway?

The biggest four buckets in the remainder of the federal budget belong to education, Veterans affairs, transportation, and the Justice department. Ordinarily those four programs collectively would consume 12% of the federal budget, or about $460 billion for FY ‘11. In my budget, they are going to have to make do with $75 billion.

So what did I cut? Let’s see, no more international affairs (1%; so long, Hillary!), no more technology or science (1%; happy trails, space station), no more energy department (you couldn’t see their pie slice with a magnifying glass before, so who will know?), no more natural resources or environment (1.5%; see ya, tree huggers), no more housing or regional development (1%; get a job, losers), no more agriculture subsidies (1%; please don’t tell the farmers where I live), and no more federal government bureaucracy (1%; welcome back to the real world, guys). That’s pretty much it; the remnants will be cleaned up by the accountants: that’s why we hire them.

With a little reflection, I see that I’ve probably cost at least a third of all healthcare workers their jobs, and have basically fired any federal employees not working for the defense department. So I just increased the number of unemployed by 6 million. That's going to ripple, as they say. I’m gonna have to call the accountants back in to figure out what to do with that lost tax revenue. And those people aren’t likely to be buying a whole lot (‘cause they’re sure not getting unemployment), so we’ll have to adjust down for lower corporate taxes, but eventually it will all stop wobbling about the center and we’ll have our number.

That was easy. 

Of course, it’s going to make Dickens’ London look like a paradise.