I have been waiting for Obama to demonstrate something good since his selection. What would have happened with baseball, had Jackie Robinson been an unqualified in the major leagues? 

So far in his presidency Obama has proven me right.  Yet, recently checked the news, and there it was; a headline that read:

Obama to Ask Congress for Power to Merge Agencies:

I panicked, thinking, “Wow, if Obama actually begins cutting the size of government and making government efficient, I might be forced to actually have to praise one of his ideas.” Obama it was said was “Making Washington work better.”

Obama wanted permission from Congress to consolidate SIX government agencies doing duplicate work, putting the onus on Congress for a leaner government. If Obama was intent on consolidating bureaucracies, I would be conflicted. Because, I know that Obama is not a small government Liberal, quite the contrary. A good idea coming from an idiot can be difficult to reconcile.  It’s like walking around with a broken watch and you happen to check it on the two moments when the watch happens to be right.  Regardless, the watch is still broken.

Obama is still broken.  All the lipstick on the pig doesn’t hide the fact that Obama is ridiculously incompetent. His use of style over substance as his way to get ahead might fool the Left, but not thinking Americans. Yet my conflict remained.

I want a smaller government.  If Obama is doing this in a significant way, then I would applaud the effort, for the sake of the country. Sure I suspected election year shenanigans, however maybe Obama had run out of Kool-Aid.  Or perhaps he was following in the footsteps of the other first black president Bill Clinton, and moving to the center?

Recall in 2011 in one of his speeches, Obama had said that he counted numerous duplicate areas of government, and that government spending was outrageous; billions either duplicated or unaccounted for.  I couldn’t agree more. Government spends money immediately, but when government cuts, they cut over ten years beginning a minimum of 4 years from now. Would this be different? 

Tortured though I was, I had watched Obama’s speech early in 2011, and the part of the speech where he discussed duplicate agencies’ activities resonated with me.  I know how big and fat government is, so big and fat that if you kicked government in its big fat butt, it would take two weeks for the kick to register in the area where the brain is supposed to reside.¹

I read a bit further in the article, and there it was. The catch:

As it turns out this new consolidation of SIX agencies would save America a whopping $3B...over TEN years. Yes, the amount of two-thirds of ONE day’s interest is what this bold new political move will save the country…over TEN years.  At that rate we could pay off our debt in…NEVER!

We could save more money annually, if we stopped studying the mating habits of South American albino pigmy leeches.

To add further insult, the $3B in savings—over TEN years—will come as these government employees retire.  You should be laughing out loud by now, because we will still incur the burden of these public sector workers, with their cushy pensions and so on. They do better in “retirement” than they did on the “job.”

So yet again, this is Obama being Obama. Politicking. The sound bite generation will hear that Obama is trying to save money. $3B to knuckleheads who want a minimum wage law translates to big savings. “Look at our cool president makin’ it happen…Go Barack!”

Don’t think Barack will go after any DC sacred cows, like the Department of MisEducation or the Department of Energy Dependence on Foreign Oil.

The Republicans will fight this in their standard way, which is to disagree and look bad on principle. Who shouldn’t be for bureaucratic consolidation, no matter how small? However what they should do is kill a frickin’ COW!

That’s my rant!

© 2012 Kevin Jackson – The Black Sphere, LLC – All Rights Reserved