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
Would three thousand five hundred billion be grammatically and factually correct when describing the deficit?