MUST READ.

by the way, reason.com is one of the best websites ever created.

"Yesterday President Obama opened the first meeting of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform by decrying "the norm around Washington...when it comes to our finances": Politicians "tell people want they want to hear instead of what they need to know." For too long, Obama said, "folks in Washington [have] deferred politically difficult decisions and avoided telling hard truths about the nature of the problem."

Toward that end, Obama's offers a gesture of bad faith:

"We've been scouring the budget, line by line, identifying more than $20 billion in savings this year alone," Obama said.

This year alone! This year, when the federal government will spend something like $3.6 trillion, $20 billion is not even big enough to be a rounding error. If that's all that line-by-line scouring yields, we are well and truly screwed.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/28/obama-we-need-a-fiscal-commiss