
Mr. Bolos used the term "sacred cows" to describe the areas of government spending that are nearly impossible to reduce without receiving extensive criticism. These areas include Medicare, Social Security, and National Defense. This description helped me put a term to something that I had noticed while watching the State of the Union address. President Obama proposed that "annual domestic spending" be frozen for the next 5 years. This seemed to me like it may have been a move to reduce spending on one of the sacred cows, so I was intrigued. I did not fully understand what was meant by domestic spending, so I researched what the freeze entailed. It turns out the freeze really just meant that the salaries of government employees could not go up for 5 years, and the government could only use the currently available funds for domestic projects rather than increasing budgets. I also saw that the spending that this freeze affects makes up only of 13% of the U.S. budget, and therefore does not touch any of the aforementioned sacred cows. The fact that this spending freeze, although it may seem major, does not affect the sacred cows shows how powerful they really are. Although President Obama is making a great effort to show that he is making strides towards reducing spending, he still understands that the sacred cows cannot be touched.