The President in his Saturday radio address called on Congress "to live within its means."  That's right; the guy driving us toward a $1.5 trillion deficit this year and a projected trillion dollar deficit for each of the next ten years wants us to tighten our belts.

How does he suggest doing so?  He proposes to shrink the deficit by $400 billion over the next decade via cuts to various discretionary budget items.  For those of you who have trouble shifting the decimal place one to the left, that's $40 billion per year.  Put another way, it's a whopping 2.7% of this year's deficit.  Quite a belt tightening, huh?  Kinda like a 300 pounder slimming all the way down to 292.  That ain't gonna win ya anything on the Biggest Loser...and it sure ain't gonna cut the deficit either.

So far, the rumored Republican plan, although targeting two and a half times more in cuts, is still way off the mark and nothing more than chump change.  Even freshman Senator Rand Paul's spending sketch which calls for a $500 billion cut to this year's budget is still somewhat timid when one considers the dramatic increase in spending that's been foisted upon us over the last two plus years.  It would still leave us with a trillion dollar deficit.  Repeat that three times slowly.

Of course, the standard excuse among pols and their pundit enablers is that these cuts are so, so difficult.  They'll tell you about  how mean, heartless deficit hawks want to eviscerate necessary programs that are depended upon by society's less fortunate.  Conveniently, they neglect to mention that there would be many fewer in the less fortunate category if our fiscal house were in order.  By the way, in Washington parlance, eviscerate translates to authorizing something short of a geometric increase.  So, trimming 5, 10, or 20 percent from programs that have seen near 100% or greater appropriations increases over the past couple/few years is met with apoplectic incredulity.

Clear thinking, logical people realize that the necessary reductions are no where near as impossible as portrayed.

Unconvinced?

What if I told you that the budget deficit for the entire year of 2007 was $165.24 billion?  Yep, less than four short years ago the country rang up red ink that was more than nine times less than what's anticipated for 2011.  Who doesn't think that in a pinch you couldn't scale back to what you spent just four years ago?

Yes, we could essentially wipe out the deficit by returning to 2007 spending—and that's before making any tough (for politicians, anyway) decisions on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Defense spending, or tax code simplification.

Remember, when the President or your Congressman or Senators starts spewing nonsense about the impossibility of more significant reductions, remind them about the impossibility of their reelection without them.

Then, channel your inner Howard Beale...

"...get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.'"

It'll feel damn good...and maybe, just maybe somebody will join you.

It worked in Egypt.