The new Florida Governor made his proposal for the 2011 state budget. It included some fairly significant cuts to corporate taxes and $7.1 billion in spending cuts.

So let's see, if the Florida legislature passes this budget then Florida will have successfully cut it's state spending by about 11%. And it will modify the business taxes to be a much more attractive place for companies to expand and hire employees.

Let's contrast that with the budget proposal published by the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives last week. They propose spending cuts of $32 billion. That's only about five times what the little ol' State of Florida cut. The whole of the federal government, even though it can print money to pay for spending, could only come up with $32 billion in cuts? A budget cut of .8%?

Rand Paul, a Tea Party leader, proposed $500 billion in federal spending cuts. That would represent about a 12% cut in the federal budget. But even if all of Paul's proposals were enacted, the resultant level of government spending would still produce a deficit in 2011 of about $1 trillion! And even Paul didn't have the cajones to propose any cuts to Medicare or Social Security!

When even the supposedly most fiscally conservative members of our Congress can only come up with budget balancing measures that only reduce the deficit by about one-third, I'm even more convinced that we're not far from having our federal budget and the amount that we're taxed dictated to us by the Chinese, or maybe a group of countries who lend us the money that we use to run our government and provide us with the entitlements we think we deserve.

I've said it here before--think Greece or Ireland. And it's going to be a lot sooner than later in my opinion.