Don't get me wrong. I think $100 billion is a lot of money. Saving it is a step in the proper direction. That said, it is not a big dent in what is going on in DC. So, here is gun nut and accountant Larry Correia:
A hundred million? That’s a lot right? Well, the news sure makes it seem like a big deal. So is a 100 Million a lot?Larry is from Utah. His math sort of explains the Tea Party Phenomenon.
Yes, unless you are the government.
So to illustrate, this is what the numbers look like when you type out all the zeros. Please forgive me if I screw up, because that is a lot of zeros.
Thousand: 1,000.00
Million: 1,000,000.00
Billion: 1,000,000,000.00
Trillion: 1,000,000,000,000.00
Okay, so far, so good. So if we are spending over a trillion dollars that we don’t have all over the last few months, how much is cutting a hundred million from a trillion? Well, that would be a .0001 cut!
To break that down into money units that most normal people would understand, that means that if you had a thousand dollar budget, you would be cutting an entire ten cents! That is a whole DIME!
Think of what you could do with that? Ten cents is like… well… I don’t really know… but it must be a big deal, because Chris Matthews thought it was awesome. You could be all like, hey dude, I just borrowed this thousand bucks from a loan shark, but I totally don’t need this ten cents. Whoo hoo! Now I only borrowed nine hundred nintey nine dollars and nintey cents! Hey, what is the interest on $999.90? Oh wait, that’s my kids and grandkids problems!
Regards — Cliff
A couple observations, and a question:
ReplyDelete1) Administrations publicly annoucing austerity programs of even modest proportions are extremely rare. In fact, in my lifetime, we've only had one that took it seriously enough to achieve a balanced budget.
2) Nobody complained (or seemed to) when the immediately previous administration took that budget surplus and returned spending back to massive deficits.
So, the question is, where were the tea partiers when we needed them almost 10 years ago???
The only answer I can come up with is that their heads were buried so far into the quicksand of party politics that they had completely lost their ability to think for themselves.
Which is to say, as encouraged as I am to see people finally waking up to the fiscal Sword of Damocles that's being created by our Federal government over the past 10 years, I'm extremely depressed to realize that all the righteousness we're seeing today is likely to evaporate the moment we have another letter change in Washington.
D-to-R and R-to-D are like saying apples-to-apples and apples-to-apples. Until people start thinking that way, this nonsense is going to continue, and we'll be the ones forever paying for it.