Fed budget bill to cost taxpayers $3M per word ( and Boehner approves every dollar)

wash times ^ | 1/18/14 | Seth Borenstein

[bestintxas]

Talk about words more costly than gold.

The giant federal budget bill that Congress passed late Thursday will cost taxpayers nearly $3 million per word, or if you want to really think big, almost $700 million per page.

The bill authorizes $1.1 trillion in spending. It is 1,582 pages long. An Internet word counting program said it has 370,445 words, numbers and symbols. So simple math comes up with $2.9 million per word average and $695 million per page average, though different parts of the budget package spend more than others sections.

By comparison, there are only 4,543 words in the U.S. Constitution, before amendments, and 1,458 words in the Declaration of Independence.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington spending watchdog, figured that senators spent slightly more than 69 hours before passing the bill, giving them just under two minutes per page to read it.

And this story is only 162 words. At $2.9 million per word that comes to $470 million. A bargain.

[bestintxas]

Living hell with Boehner

[a fool in paradise]

People have difficulty understanding just how big these numbers are.

Here are some images from Eames' powers of 10 film.

People should try to put a $17,000,000,000,000.00 debt or a $1,100,000,000,000 budget in perspective.

One	100	1.	"ten to the zero"
ten	101	10.	"ten to the one"
hundred	102	100.	"ten to the two"
thousand	103	1,000.	"ten to the three"
ten thousand	104	10,000.	"ten to the four"
hundred thousand	105	100,000.	"ten to the five"
million	106	1,000,000.	"ten to the six"
ten million	107	10,000,000.	"ten to the seven"
hundred million	108	100,000,000.	"ten to the eight"
billion	109	1,000,000,000.	"ten to the nine"
ten billion	1010	10,000,000,000.	"ten to the ten"
hundred billion	1011	100,000,000,000.	"ten to the eleven"
trillion	1012	1,000,000,000,000.	"ten to the twelve"
ten trillion	1013	10,000,000,000,000.	"ten to the thirteen"

[ClearCase_guy]

Laws should be short and understandable by a Middle School student.

Any law which is 1000 pages long is just social engineering by bureaucrats who want to do what they want to do and are depending on some badly written document to provide cover for their expensive schemes.

[Grams A]

Been trying to find the final vote for the House by name on the internet and can’t locate it. Really need to know which of the Texas delegation voted for it and which voted against. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Well at least they saved $8 billion by screwing the Veterans pensions. Lets give them some credit. :-)

[TonyM]

I just signed the TEA Party petition to fire Boehner, firethespeaker.com. We need to get someone like Cruz to be speaker as soon as possible.

[Georgia Girl 2]

I nominate Louie Ghomert.

[StoneWall Brigade]

Here’s Johnny!

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk