Federal deficit commission is worthless

The bipartisan federal deficit commission set up by President Obama issued a draft set of ideas on how to get rid of some of the red ink in the budget.

So let's go through some of the ideas:

* Reduce Congressional & White House budgets by 15 percent - saving $800 million
* Freeze federal salaries, bonuses, and other compensation at non-defense agencies - $42 billion
* Cut the federal workforce by 10 percent - $13.2 billion
* Eliminate 250,000 non-defense service and staff augmentee contractors - $18.4 billion
* Eliminate all earmarks - $16 billion
* Eliminate funding for commercial spaceflight - $1.2 billion
* Eliminate grants to large and medium-sized hub airports - $1.2 billion

Some of them probably make sense to you right away - but as you can see - most of these aren't truly "big ticket" items.

It's a reminder of how difficult it is to actually cut the budget.

The plan also focused on savings of $100 billion in the Pentagon as well.

* Three year salary freeze for civilian workers in the military - $5.3 billion
* Freeze non-combat military pay levels for three years - $9.2 billion
* End purchases of the V-22 Osprey
* Cut by half the planned purchases of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
* Reduce overseas deployments by one-third - $8.5 billion
* Modernize the DOD Tricare health system - $6 billion

Add up all the savings and you are just short of $222 billion. Think that is a lot than you need to watch the following video.

http://wimp.com/budgetcuts/

Now that you watched the video you understand that this is only 1/2 penny on the table. In my opinion this is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.