The audacity of trimming

President Barack Obama asked Congress Thursday to eliminate or trim 121 federal programs for a "savings" of $17 billion in the coming budget year -- while crossing his fingers behind his back and failing to mention that he actually plans to shift that money into programs he likes better.

"Seventeen billion dollars a year is not chump change by anyone's accounting," brayed White House budget director Peter Orszag.

Actually, it is. The proposed "cuts" -- even if they were cuts -- amount to less than one-half of 1 percent of President Obama's $3.6 trillion federal budget outline, which calls for tax-funded increases of almost 10 percent over current funding for non-defense agency budgets ... during a recession.

Not only that, many of these tucks and trims had already been proposed by President Bush and rejected by Mr. Obama's Democratic colleagues -- making Mr. Obama's attempt to pose as a "budget-cutter" even more wink-and-nudge than usual.

The president himself admitted that winning congressional approval for even these minor, symbolic "cuts" -- despite which the budget, the deficit and the debt would all still grow to vast and unprecedented size -- would "not be easy."

For instance, the president -- like his predecessor, George W. Bush -- called for phasing out direct payments to farmers with sales exceeding $500,000 annually. But this has "already been rejected by Obama's allies in Congress," The AP reports.

President Obama also announced he wants to terminate production of C-17 cargo aircraft. Instead, to protect the jobs of local constituents, "A key House panel is proposing adding $2.2 billion for 8 C-17s to Obama's pending war request," The AP reports.

And Mr. Obama doesn't even propose to apply these small, symbolic "savings" to reducing the deficit. Instead, "The White House is funneling them back into other programs," The Associated Press reports.

About half the budget "savings" would come from an effort by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to curb defense programs.

On the other hand, Mr. Obama -- despite a campaign pledge to end "earmark" funding, declined to propose eliminating any of the thousands of earmarks funded in the $410 billion catchall spending bill passed in March, and "left untouched a favorite of some lawmakers, a $9 million program to promote whaling and trading history at museums in Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Mississippi -- a collection of states represented by Obama ally Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and a handful of senior appropriators."

Desperately needed whaling museums?

The merits of any single cut can always be debated. But today's fiscal madness -- and the huge and disabling tax hikes likely to follow in its wake -- are too severe to allow quibbling.

Republicans should embrace every one of the president's proposed cuts -- demanding that Democrats follow the lead of their own, still-popular president.

Then, when the crackers and cheese have been wolfed down, demand to know "Where's the beef?" If an economic recovery is what's desired, the government needs to stop borrowing, freeing up those lines of credit for the private sector. That will require spending cuts -- not punitive tax hikes -- sufficient to put federal budgets in surplus, not ongoing deficits.