A Pack Of Gum For The A.D.D. And Innumeracy Riddled Populace

clipped from blogs.usatoday.com When it comes to federal spending, there's a pattern emerging with President Obama, and it's not a flattering one. The president says all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control, but his actions don't come close to matching his rhetoric. Then, when he unveiled his 2010 budget last week, Obama made a big deal of his demand for $17 billion in cuts, insisting that the cuts "even by Washington standards ... are significant" and that $17 billion is "real money." The president got it backward. Out in the rest of the world, $17 billion is a ton of money. But in Washington, where the president is proposing to spend $3.6 trillion next year, $17 billion looks puny — a little less than half a percent of the budget, or the equivalent of cutting a $100 grocery bill by handing back a 50-cent pack of gum.