Obama’s latest ploy is to dress his imperial majesty in budget-cutter clothing, demanding sacrifice around the Cabinet table. One Hundred Million Dollars! Sure sounds like a lot of money. But even the AP isn’t fooled, having borrowed a calculator with scientific notation from the geeky guy in IT and concluded that 100 million dollars per annum to the federal government is like a large latte and a scone to a middle class family. Per year, that is. My colleague Rand Simberg calls it “100 MicroBaracks” which does not quite roll off the tongue like Brian Riedl’s acute observation that $100M is the amount the federal government spends every 13 minutes.
None of which means anything to Obama’s target audience, which is the vast shallow sea of government-educated folks who are fuzzy on the difference between a million and a trillion, who don’t order scones, who couldn’t quite explain the difference between $6 a day and $6 a year, or for that matter, the difference between 13 minutes a day and 13 minutes a year.
The ideal target audience, in other words, for the desperate ploy by some conservatives to downbrand the Democratic Party as the Democratic Fascist Party. Jonah Goldberg wrote the illuminating text “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change“, which drew jeers and cheers from the usual suspects but which went largely unnoticed by Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere. Now Jim Lindgren reports that the liberal=fascist meme is starting to break out into the general conversation, to the extent that liberal commentators are girding their defenses.
What does it all mean? It means that the political class believes that a non-negligible percentage of the voting population is composed of idiots. To some non-negligible extent, they may be right.
Friday, 24 April 2009 at 20:29
This had me confused most greatly. Leaving aside that 100 million dollars is chicken-feed, and impresses no one, wasn’t it just last month that we needed to spend 750 billlion like drunken sailors, just to be spending it?Stimulus now, worry about the budget (much) later?Doing this, and talking it up, gives markets the idea that they’re already thinking of fiscal contraction. One wouldn’t think that was the message du jour, but there doesn’t seem to be a truly coherent strategy.
Sunday, 26 April 2009 at 13:42
I think we have basically two interpretations available here: (1) Obama, like many lawmakers, has only a foggy concept of big numbers, i.e. the difference between a million and billion and a trillion doesn’t mean much to him, and (2) this was a cynical ploy to mitigate his growing reputation as the most profligate spender in history, at least among the small fraction of rubes who also have only a foggy concept of big numbers. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive options….