Drum Major Institute on the 2008 State of The Union

Jan 29, 2008

Searching for some numbers to go along with Bush’s final State of The Union address, I stumbled across this piece by the oddly-named Drum Major Institute. Their rebuttal covers the main points that were made presented with quotes from the speech alongside the DMI’s official riposte sound byte. Furthermore, the institute provides more in depth dissection of their position with (select) numbers to back up their retort. Being a biased response, the commentary doesn’t fully explore each issue, but that’s not to say it’s anything like Fox News biased.

The specific statistic I was searching for after hearing Robert Siegel or David Welna (I’m so old-school I listened to it on the radio) mention that Bush’s $18b cut of so-called useless programs from the federal budget was really a small change. Indeed it is, as the proposed federal budget is $2.9 trillion for 2008, making Bush vaunted cuts a mere .6%.