Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Eating Budget Cuts

When you're talking about real money, like billions or trillions of dollars, those numbers are so big we have no clue how much that really is. So they give us analogies, like if you stacked dollar bills on top of each other, a trillion dollars would go to the moon and back and halfway to the moon again. But we still don't get that.

We do understand food, though.

Back in March, John Hinderaker at Power Line explained the $6 billion spending cut in that continuing resolution in terms of a Big Mac Value Meal.


Hinderaker gives the math, but I'll just cut to the chase:

So, consider: if you were to go on what the Democrats consider a starvation diet, and "slash" your calorie intake to exactly the same degree that the Republicans' $6 billion cut has "slashed" the federal budget, you would do the following. Go to McDonalds and order a Big Mac Extra Value meal. Eat the Big Mac. Drink the Coke. Eat 86 of the 87 french fries. Carefully take the last fry and bite off two-thirds of it. Put the remaining one-third of one fry back in the bag.

Yep. I understand that.

But that was then. This is now. Now they're talking budgets for whole years, not just continuing resolutions for three weeks. A year is over 17 times bigger than three weeks, and the proposed budget cuts are only 10 times bigger than the continuing resolution cuts. It feels as though we're going backwards, while Washington is screaming either that we've really done a Great Thing (the Republicans) or that we're Killing Babies and Old People (the Democrats). How do we make sense of it all?

With more food, of course. Leave it to Michael Ramirez to make understanding the budget cuts as easy as pie (HT: Power Line). Click to enlarge:


Now isn't that clear? They're all full of beans, soon to be followed by a lot of hot air.

And we're not swallowing any of it anymore.

2 comments:

Malott said...

Eventually followed by inflation which will make both the retired and the poor... very, very poor.

Delta R. Vines said...

SP, I don't know about you, but not only am I no longer swallowing it - I'm no longer chewing on it either!

Cut some of the salaries of congress. Make them purchase health insurance in the same way we do. Take away the private planes some have. Make them share an apartment with another member of congress to save on the amount delegated for housing in DC.

AND - (forgive me, but, I'm NOT quoting Donald...I've been saying this for years) - Line up some oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and fill them up with oil so we can recover some of the money we have spent on a country which was supposed to have enough money from it's oil to pay itself for it's restoration.

I'm tired of building up other countries which are self-destroyed while our country is being torn down.

Ok. Getting off soapbox now. I feel much better having let off steam. Thank you. :-)