Dear President Obama:
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. And I think it was swell that you decided to cut your Hawaiian holiday short for those pesky fiscal-cliff talks.
But let me ask you something: Why did you leave your wife and daughters behind? Why didn’t they hitch a ride with you on Air Force One?
I don’t mean to be petty, but this goes to the crux of our financial woes — wasteful spending.
Air Force One costs $181,757 an hour to operate. And the flight from Hawaii to DC is about 10 hours long. Let’s round things off and say it is costing American taxpayers $1.8 million just to get you back early from your vacation.
If your return to Washington guaranteed a fiscal-cliff agreement, then I guess it would be worth the price. But you can disagree with the Republicans just as easily over a free cellphone call as you can after a $1.8 million trip.
And what about Michelle, Sasha and Malia?
I assume your wife and daughters will be returning to the White House shortly. Unless some rich Democratic Party friend is flying them free on his private plane, taxpayers will have to foot the bill for that trip as well.
So will it cost us another $3.6 million to get Air Force One back to Hawaii so it can get your family to DC?
You see my point? No, you probably don’t.
The US has more than $16 trillion in debt, and the amount is climbing every second because the waste is everywhere.
I also read in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that you are thinking of expanding your mortgage-refinance program to include people who are underwater on home loans that aren’t owned by government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Another great idea! I know a few people in my family who would benefit. The only problem is: How much is that going to cost taxpayers?
Anyway, you probably don’t have time to look up commercial airfares — you know, with the fiscal-cliff talks at such a critical stage and all — but you can put Michelle and the girls on Alaska Air from Honolulu to Reagan Airport for $697 apiece.
So for a little more than $2,000 total, they can be fellow travelers with the rest of us. (Maybe I shouldn’t have put it quite that way.)
Give Alaska Air a call if you’d like to hold seats for the family.
Signed,
One very perplexed columnist,
John Crudele
The fiscal-cliff talks are, of course, a joke.
The Republicans want some mixture of tax increases and spending cuts that equals $1 trillion. And the president is demanding that the number be $1.3 trillion.
Both of those figures are spread out over 10 years — that’s the fine print in this whole charade. Some people make out better under one plan or the other, but essentially neither plan — even without accounting tricks — will do anything to substantially reduce our deficit or our financial problems. Our annual deficit will go barely under $1 trillion with either plan, and that assumes the economy doesn’t get weaker and take down the amount of tax revenues received by the government.
In other words, any agreement that the Republicans and Democrats come up with (and they will have to come up with something) will be ineffective.
If we do go over the now-infamous fiscal cliff, $800 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will happen next week. That will get us under $1 trillion in a hurry. But our deficits will still be around 2008’s level of $455 billion, which was a startlingly high figure back then. And the economy will be slowed by that $800 billion in cuts and taxes.
So should we start selling off our national monuments to cut debt? China would probably give us $10 billion for Yellowstone.
I’ve been preaching a better solution for years. Maybe Washington is desperate enough now to listen to lil’ ol’ me.
So here goes: The key to solving the nation’s financial problems is economic growth. We can’t raise taxes and cut spending fast enough to reduce our deficit if tax revenues continue to slide during our economic doldrums.
The Federal Reserve can’t do any more to help growth, since it has had interest rates down to zero and its policy is now hurting the economy by taking money out of the pockets of savers.
And Washington, obviously, can’t use the old Keynesian formula for economic recovery — spending money. It has already spent like wild, and that hasn’t helped much.
The only other solution is to allow Americans to stimulate the economy by spending their own money.
What money, you say? Money they have saved up in tax-advantaged retirement plans.
You’ve heard this speech before. Washington should allow Americans to use money that’s been piling up in IRAs, 401(k)s and other plans to buy real estate. Houses are the key to a true economic recovery, since so many other industries feed off housing.
That’s how we can get the economy growing at a nice clip again.
What about the fiscal-cliff talks?
If the White House sends Air Force One up here to pick me up, I’ll go to Washington to work out the details. Maybe my kids can join me later on a separate plane.