Honest to God, this was the top headline on WashingtonPost.com:
Obama to Order Cabinet To Identify Budget CutsConvening members for first time today, president is to ask for a combined $100M to be cut over the next 90 days, senior administration official says.
Cutting $100,000,000?
Federal outlays for 2009, according to the Obama Administration, are supposed to be $3,938,000,000,000. That's, roughly, four million millions of dollars.
So, the Big Story today is that Obama wants to cut spending by about 1/40,000th of the budget?
Isn't this just a transparent PR ploy?
Really, if the newspapers went bankrupt and were nationalized and run by the Obama Administration, would there be any noticeable difference?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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22 comments:
No.
And that is because newspapers are SWPL central. And SWPL the most is Obama.
There you go again with all that "quantitative analysis." Not everyone can follow all that convoluted math; I wish you would just focus on the facts.
I'm thinking the old Anglo(I assume) practice of calling 1 billion 1,000 million needs to be readopted. It gives a sense of scale. These days, of course we need to up it by 10^3 and start calling 1 trillion 1,000 billion.
I agree with Testing99 that the message from the Media wouldn’t change if the Media was owned by Obama or his administration.
However, has it ever occurred to anyone that it is the reverse, that those who control the media own (or think they own, in large part because they created him) Obama?
I mean, I haven’t really noticed the Obama administration, in all its blaming of America first, taking issue with the one sided US support of Israel, yet. If and when that happens we will see if there is any difference between the Media and the Obama administration.
What a joke. Because I'm an intolerably irritating pedant, during political arguments I often ask people what 10% of 100 billion is. The vast majority get it wrong.
Seriously, by now every schoolgirl must know that Time/Newsweek/NYT aka ST/Wapo/LAT and the alphabet networks are just Obama shills. When they spout anything, you can delete it without even considering that you'll miss out on any valuable news.
The Idiocracy is here and now. It is not yet in full bloom but it has definitely arrived. Most anything math related in a newspaper goes over the heads of the readership.
The fictional "idiocracy" was amusing in the movie but the real thing isn't amusing at all. Dumb countries are dangerous, deadbeat and dysfunctional.
Rock bottom idiocy can be found in modern day Somalia. We won't sink that far but keep an eye out for rapidly spreading "___ization" coming to a neighborhood near you.
>Seriously, by now every schoolgirl must know that Time/Newsweek/NYT aka ST/Wapo/LAT and the alphabet networks are just Obama shills.
you're living in a bubble. think back to the early bushgasm years when the gop robots' hero could do no wrong......now we have a giant new army of dem robots who literally won't come down from their endorphin high for years.
obama still has 59% overall approval and democrats still support him at stratospheric levels around 88% and they still support their soviet style media outlets too.......i don't have any actual data but my gut tells me that the crash in liberal media viewership/readership is the revulsion of the conservatives who used to make up a large percentage of cnn and time mag customers....yes people on the right are much more likely to be general news junkies and they enjoy monitoring the democrat media outlets as it feeds their outrage.........
but the media became so biased in the election year that the right has basically decamped and caused the crash in overall viewership/readership of the liberal media.....but the same old left leaning viewership/readership is there at all the old standby media outlets..........it's just that they are now there all alone.
Unless, of course, there are demonstrably conservative programs left to be dismantled. I can't for the life of me think of one, but if his committee can identify and eradicate anything vaguely patriotic or traditional, they'll have at it!
If the newspapers went bankrupt they would not be nationalized and run by the Obama administration. The owners would get a cash bailout of $50 billion. And staffers would be asked to go easy on the Post-Its and paper clips.
Obama must have watched "Dave" this weekend. There's a ridiculous (although fascinating for what it says about American political culture) scene where Kevin Kline and his cabinet sit around and scrounge up some meager sum to fund homeless children's education or some such thing so he can get in the First Lady's pants. This should be a hoot.
After the fall of the wall a contingent including American journalism professors and professionals from the publishing industry traveled to the former Eastern Bloc countries to give seminars advising the former state writers on entry into their Brave New World of market based writing, touching on the basics of factuality, readership interest, conciseness etc. One of the attendees, feeling gloomy about his prospects, raised his hand to query, "Well, if we are not to paid by the word anymore then on what basis is compensation?"
When pajamas are outlawed only the pajamahadeen will have pajamas.
wake up,
Have you ever considered googling how to use punctuation? One dot is called a period, three of them in in a row are ellipsis. This symbol - is called a dash.
Take a shot at nailing it.
i thought i was seeing things when i read that headline. 100 million? is that a typo? is that per department? no, it turns out to be 100 million total. not even worth discussion on the internet, let alone an appearance in the US national news.
obama has exhausted my adjective vocabulary. i'm not sure how you are even supposed to handle this news compared to other news such as the cancellation of the F22 program.
I had just assumed that there was a typo in the figures: they must have meant a hundred billion, or something, which, even then, is a drop in the bucket.
Note to self: you really are that naive sometimes.
However, has it ever occurred to anyone that it is the reverse, that those who control the media own (or think they own, in large part because they created him) Obama?
That's my take on it. They put him in office, but they paid a huge price to do it. Now only half the country believes anything they have to say.
It is enormously depressing when *$100,000,000* of our dollars (mine, yours, and the other 40% of us shouldering the load) forcibly given over to Uncle Sugar becomes mere "budget dust".
This is the equivalent of the head of a typical middle-class household calling a family meeting to discuss their budget, then tasking the spouse and the kids to spend the next 90 days finding ways to save a dime a month.
Or to put it another way:
US Federal Government expenditures per capita, FY 2010:
$19,886.80.
Proposed Cabinet spending cuts, per capita:
$0.32
For the love of Benji.. The problem is the numbers are so big, no one understands how small a percentage of the federal budget $100 million is.
This is point made repeatedly by liberal economist Dean Baker in his excellent blog Beat The Press.
The larger question is since the economy is deflating faster than the Federal Reserve can print money, isn't this the wrong time to be cutting back on government spending?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12946
obama has exhausted my adjective vocabulary. i'm not sure how you are even supposed to handle this news compared to other news such as the cancellation of the F22 programWait, are you saying this is a bad thing? I would love for you to enlighten me on why it's a bad idea for the outrageously indebted United States government to suspend purchase of any more $140 million per unit F-22 Raptors, a fighter which is not even being used in Iraq or Afghanistan, and is unlikely to ever see real action.
Anonymous: There you go again with all that "quantitative analysis." Not everyone can follow all that convoluted math; I wish you would just focus on the facts.
You know, earlier this afternoon, some fellow at The Corner made that point:
Obama's $100 Million CutBrian Riedl
Monday, April 20, 2009; Posted at 1:41 PM
corner.nationalreview.com
So why bother? Because it may enhance the president's "budget-cutter" image. Seriously. President Obama has reportedly been working closely with noted behavioral economists, and their studies have shown that most people are "insensitive to scope," meaning they are not very good at putting large numbers in their proper context. People will react about the same to a policy proposal whether the cost/benefit is $10 million, $10 billion, or $10 trillion. Consequently, the $100 million cut may seem huge to many voters. (Note to conservative lawmakers: This is why the tiny 2005 reconciliation spending cuts were just as difficult to enact as the substantially larger 1990s reconciliation spending cuts. So if you are going to propose spending cuts, you may as well go big).By the way, that Time Magazine article is pretty scary:
How Obama Is Using the Science of ChangeBy Michael Grunwald
Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009
time.com
Bottom line - if we have already arrived at the point where more than 50% of all Americans cannot reliably discern the difference between $10 million, $10 billion, and $10 trillion, then the situation is hopeless.
You cannot build a Free Republic on the backs of that kind of idiocy - it simply will not work.
In all honesty, our only long term hope now is some form of secession.
Glenn Beck was leading with this on Fox News today, but he put the mooted cut as high as 1/35,000th of the budget.
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