Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Comparing Pounds to Pennies

The one thing you have to be careful of when you listen to political speeches is to not allow yourself to be bowled over with the "big number effect". When a politician talks about how wonderful X-massive-number-of-dollars is, remember to think about other numbers that the same politician would not want his wonderful X number put next to:

To paraphrase George Bush in the SOTU tonight: "We cut $40 billion in spending out of the budget. Isn't that awesome?"

Fine: That means you've got about 7 months of the war in Iraq paid for. You now have enough to cover half the bill for the Katrina disaster. You're 10% of the way to balancing the budget. You've made up about 5% of the annual revenue lost from your tax cuts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am confused, are you not in favor of the tax cuts?
Yes, the benifit the rich more (they make more money) but a tax cut is a tax cut.
No matter how much excess the goverment has in money, they still mismanage it.
Taxes were higher for me during the Clinton years and I never recieved a rebate check.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of Brokeback Washington but I do agree with his tax cuts.
..and that's about it.
Good blog, by the way