This weekend, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spoke with Chris Matthews on "Fox News Sunday."  During the interview, Pelosi delivered a quote that may be the early front runner for most absurd quote of 2013: “It is almost a false argument to say that we have a spending problem.  We have a budget deficit problem.”  Needless to say, it is very difficult to understand where Leader Pelosi is coming from on this one.  Budget deficit problems don’t spawn out of thin air… What is more worrisome is that this ideology appears to be held by several members of Congress.  On January 9, 2013, while speaking on the Senate Floor on the topic of relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) made a similar comment about spending not being a problem: "I am not going to keep cutting the discretionary budget, which by the way is not out of control, despite what you hear on Fox News." Historically, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP.  As this chart from the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, federal spending has been drastically increasing of late, and is the main reason that the U.S. federal budget deficit topped $1 trillion for the fourth straight year.  The government has hardly done anything to reduce spending, and even when it has, the measures have been largely hollow.  Included among the “cuts” to the federal budget in 2011 was $6.2 billion that the Census Bureau said it would not need because it would not perform a census in 2011.  At the Federal Transit Administration, $630 million was “cut” from the budget.  The problem?  The purported savings were derived from programs that had already been cancelled for other reasons. Tomorrow, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address.  If he wants to show that he’s serious about reducing the Nation’s debt and deficits, he will call for an end to budget gimmickry and propose real solutions to cut our government spending.  Unfortunately for taxpayers, the chances of this happening are slim to none.