A New Budget

I have a new budget. For one reason or another, things are a bit tight right now, financially speaking...join the rest of America, right? So, I'm trying to do my bit to economize, asking myself if I really need this or that before buying and comparing product prices a bit more carefully. Since I am mostly in charge of meals and shopping for their ingredients, I've been trying to trim in that area as well. So, when the local grocery store put pork steaks and whole chickens on sale for 78 cents a pound, I bought a couple of big packages of pork and a few chickens. A protein source for under a dollar a pound (even once bones are removed) is a find!

Of course, there is a bit more work involved for me, but I bless my childhood and my frugal mother in these times. Unlike many of my peers, I know how to coax palatable meals out of cheap cuts of meat. I can quickly cut up (and de-bone if necessary) a chicken into usable parts. Fat gets rendered to make schmaltz (a wonderful cooking fat, for those uninitiated), and bones become stock for soup. I can get three meals for my husband and myself out of one chicken, easily, and do. Korean bbq chicken legs & thighs, chicken breast and vegetable stir fry and chicken soup with matzo balls. Tandoori chicken, chicken salad sandwiches and Caldo de Pollo. Chicken cacciatore, chicken pot pie, chicken fried rice.

My pork steaks get cut up too. The fattier half with the bone gets marinated to throw on the grill. Thai coconut milk & lemon grass pork chops, the Greek flavors of lemon, oregano and garlic, Korean bbq marinade, with it's fiery chili & garlic combo. The leaner section gets chunked and marinated for Spanish style tapas skewers or pork stew, or pounded into thin,tender submission, destined to become stir fries, pork Marsala or Picatta.

Of course, I expend a fair amount of time doing all this, but I save money. When trimming a budget, one must spend less or make expenses count for more...usually both.

Our President has submitted a new budget for our country. 3.8 trillion dollars, which forecasts a record-breaking deficit of 1.6 trillion dollars. For all his recent talk about cutting expenses, having to get the deficit under control, and making tough choices, it's hard for me to see just what he's done about any of those things. Without even resorting to my calculator, I can see that 1.6 is more than one third of 3.8! A trillion, by the way, is one thousand billions, under the American system (apparently it differs elsewhere in the world, don't ask me how THAT works!), for those of you who weren't sure...I wasn't, so I had to look it up. So one third of Fiscal Hawk Obama's budget is going to get slapped right onto the thighs of our deficit.

Gosh, what would I have to do to get away with spending one third more money than my budget allowed? Where would I get the money? Well, I suppose I could raise my rates, charge my customers more, but if I charge them too much they'd likely fire me. The government can charge us more, but, not wanting to get fired, the individuals running our government first try to fool us by calling their charge increases “fees” instead of “taxes.” Another sneaky method is to do their best to rile us up against some “bad guy” (like corporations, banks, or rich people) and then slap taxes on him, hoping we don't notice that the “bad guy” is simply going to pass the charge increase onto us. The “bad guy” becomes the government's middleman, if you will. A third way of sneakily dipping deeper into our pockets is to blather on about not raising taxes while quietly letting past tax cuts expire. I don't know about you, but if more money is being taken out of my paycheck, I don't particularly care if it isn't technically a new tax or increase.

Well, politicos are well aware that they can't press us too hard...that's why they spend so much of the time we pay them to represent us trying to figure out ways to trick us out of more of our money...without suffering the consequences. So, they do what I would have to do were I to doggedly keep spending a third more than I have, despite having raised charges to my customers all I could get away with raising. I'd have to borrow money.

For a while, of course, I could play the payment dance. I could pay this bill today, that bill next month, and then change partners for the next month. Um...Social Security come to mind?

But, sooner or later, I'd have to borrow money from somewhere to keep the wolves from the door. Of course, barring the existence of a rich and very fond auntie somewhere, I'd be stuck with going to a bank and proving to the loan officer that I was a good bet by offering up collateral.

Where does Obama propose to borrow this money?

So far, a good deal of it has come from China. Of course, it isn't called a loan. We “sell” China our debt. Now, the whole relationship is extremely complicated, involving the World Market, trade, goods production and consumption. It is so complicated that for every economist I found who thinks the amount of our debt China owns is a bad thing and that they could pull the rug out from under our economy at any time, I found another who insists it isn't and they won't. But, though an economist I'm not, I do have the common sense to know that if you are dependent upon another country to keep your own economy afloat, that country has power over yours. How much power do we want the Communist regime in China to have over our government? The economists who are not alarmed at this thought dismiss concerns that China could cease buying our debt or even dump the debt they have on the World Market, seriously damaging our economy, if not sending it into collapse. They make the argument that China is too dependent upon us for trade, that they need us to buy the manufactured goods that power their own economy. This sounds reassuring except that when dealing with China, one must remember that we are dealing with a dictatorship that has a pretty tight fist closed on it's people. The regime “ins” wouldn't suffer hardship in case of a debt/trade war with the US, only the Chinese people would. And frankly, China has more people than they know what to do with now. It wouldn't be the first time that a Communist/Socialist regime knowingly sacrificed it's subjects' comfort or lives to gain power over an enemy or rival.

So, I would like to hear the President talk about fiscal responsibility a little less and exhibit it a little more. I would like to hear fewer platitudes about tightening our belts and making “the rich” pay their “fair share” and see some evidence of our government tightening it's belt. I'd like our President to quit gallivanting around the world apologizing in the name of our country for things we needn't apologize for, concerning himself with College Football and where the Olympics are held, and whether or not gays in the military should be asked and should tell, and spend his time going through his 3.8 Trillion dollar budget line by line as he promised and do some real trimming of the budget. I'd even lend him my boning knife.