A Modest Proposal

The budget battle starts in simulated earnest this week. Ignoring the fact that last year's Congress totally avoided a budget the propaganda war starting today is about those nasty Republicans seeking to steal Grandma's blanket and sentence your children to ignorance and slavery for their entire lives. Or we can go with the Messiah's creative fiscal policy of changing "simulus" to "investment" and freezing spending at newly elevated levels without anyone having to feel a bit of pinch then peppering it all with tax increases masking as something else.

I haven't been elected. I won't get to be part of the floor debate. I'm just Joe Bagadonutz, sitting in fly-over country waiting for Godot. But, what does this make you consider:

The Budget Rolls Off the Presses

Consider that this is a draft of the President's spending plan. Each trio of volumes you see there is one copy. It is filled with line after line of dollar amounts. It is an anal-retentive accountant's playground and a politicians speech prop. No one will actually dog-ear those pages. Congressional staffers will be tasked to pore through it for illustrative points for their particular agenda.

Now, recognize that modern printing is done digitally. The source documents are digitized into editable files which are globally formatted, spell-checked and even spreadsheet number crunched before printing. Trees died, oil was consumed for ink, more trees were chopped for shipping pallets, workers were employed to move the bulk and it will all be discarded within a week or two as the budget evolves.

Let's start the budget cuts with the obvious. Skip the Gutenburg and go with the Gates. Put it on a flashdrive. Burn it to a CD-ROM. Gmail it as a mega-attachment. Hell, you could even put it on an iPod with the Congressman's favorite music playing in the background.

It would be portable, searchable, editable, exchangeable, cut/paste-able, and update-able. It might actually be used.

And it would save a chunk of noise-level change in the budget.