Obama touts $17 billion 'lot of money' budget cuts

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama sent Congress his first budget Thursday boasting of cutting or killing 121 federal programs in a belt-tightening he likened to that of most Americans in difficult times. But the trims amount to a tiny fraction of the new spending he wants, and some have already been nixed by allies on Capitol Hill.

Obama said his cuts would amount to $17 billion — in a budget totaling well over $3 trillion for the fiscal year that begins in October. He's estimating the government's red ink will still be about $1.2 trillion, down only slightly from this year's all-time record.

Now read this with a straight face and then howl!

Little Johnny is at it again...

President Obama was visiting a primary school and h e visited one of the classes. They were in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings. The teacher asked the president if he would like to lead the discussion on the word ‘tragedy’? So our illustrious president asked the class for an example of a ‘tragedy’.

One little boy stood up and offered: ‘If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a tractor runs over him and kills him, that would be a tragedy?’

‘No,’ said Obama, ‘that would be an accident.’

A little girl raised her hand: ‘If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy.’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ explained Obama. ‘That’s what we would call great loss.’

The room went silent. No other children volunteered. Obama searched the room. ‘Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?’

Finally at the back of the room, Little Johnny raised his hand. In a quiet voice he said: ‘If the plane carrying you and Mrs. Obama was struck by a ‘friendly fire’ missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy.’

‘Fantastic!’ exclaimed Obama. ‘That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be tragedy?’

‘Well,’ says the boy, ‘It has to be a tragedy, because it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss... and it probably wouldn’t be a Damn accident either..

17 billion dollars is a HUGE amount of money. However, when you say you’re cutting 17 billion dollars out of a 3.5 trillion dollar budget, then you’re just making a bad joke.

$17,000,000,000 in cuts from a $35,000,000,000,000 budget works out to a budget cut of roughly five one-thousanths of one percent! In numbers, that works out to 0.005%. If the budget were $1000, the cut would be one shiny nickle! $.05 all together.

The problem is that the spending is so great that the only people that can really deal with numbers like this are people trained in the hard sciences: You really need to use scientific notation to deal with them. Most “mortals” simply can’t deal with numbers of this type.

Mark

Is there a schedule of White House announcements and briefings? If so, where could I get it.

I’m pretty illiterate about the stock market, but even I’ve noticed that every time the ‘bamster talks, the market drops.

I think I could get rich: buy stocks whenever his mouth moves, sell when he shuts up.

“I will not release woodticks into Stephanie’s hair”

I really need some new glasses, and/or to stop working so many hours on the computer. When I first saw this, I thought it said “I will not release woodchucks into Stephanie’s hair”

But I can see how your punishment would have seared the concept of "1000" into your head!

Mark

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.