Give Him the Knife

Mandatory spending cuts are set to kick in on Friday and Mr. Obama continues to forecast woe and debacle. It's a lot like the Y2K scare. Remember that? Ramirez offers a visual to place the sequester into its proper perspective:

Senators Imhofe and Toomey are advancing a plan that would allay Mr. Obama's fears about what will happen when these cuts kick in: Simply allow the president to decide where the cuts will occur.

If Mr. Obama is concerned about essential services being cut indiscriminately then let him make the cuts where he thinks best instead of simply demagoguing the issue as he has been for the past couple of weeks. I think this is an excellent idea, and we here at Viewpoint even have a few suggestions, should Mr. Obama deign to ask us, as to where he might start.

He could, for example:

• Postpone the navy's program to switch machinery to run on biofuels which will cost more than $2 billion a year more than conventional fuel.
• Postpone the army's $28 billion battlefield intelligence processor that has failed operational tests.
• Use the savings from the Afghanistan conflict which is now being wound down to fund other military needs.
• Stop spending $1.7 billion a year on maintaining unused federal property.
• Stop giving $115 billion a year in benefits to people not entitled to them.
• Stop giving out $1.6 billion worth of free public cellphones.
• Cancel the $100 million in grants awarded by EPA to foreign countries.
• Cancel the $51.6 million being spent to promote Obamacare.
• Cancel the $4 million spent each year to maintain a television studio at the IRS.
• Cancel the $1.2 million spent by the National Science Foundation to teach senior citizens how to play the World of Warcraft video game.

Surely it's easy to find fat to cut out of the government, and I'm confident that if Congress gives Mr. Obama the paring knife he'd set about slicing it away just as he promised he would when he was campaigning in 2008.