From the "every penny counts" department

Rep. Bill Owens, D-Plattsburgh, announced today that he will return more than $40,000 of his 2009 office budget to the United States Treasury to help pay down the federal deficit.

The national debt is $12.6 trillion, so Mr. Owens’ donation represents a payment of 3.2 ten-millionths percent.

“As Northern New Yorkers everywhere are tightening their belts more than ever, so too must every member of Congress,” the congressman said in a statement. “We cannot seriously talk about being a good steward to the taxpayer or being fiscally responsible without practicing the same standards as our working families back home.”

Mr. Owens, who took office in November, received a prorated amount of $231,000 for 2009, so his donation represents about 17 percent of his budget.

His 2010 office budget is $1.47 million — an amount that will cover staff salaries, furniture, equipment, constituent correspondence and anything else not campaign related.

The National Republican Congressional Committee once suggested that Mr. Owens’s donation of $250 to then gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer, which represented six ten-thousandths of his overall fundraising, “put the Spitzer-Paterson administration into office.”

Maybe Mr. Owens will run a commercial this fall which uses the NRCC’s logic to claim he helped retire the federal debt while in office.