Politics into a Language We All Understand

It can be hard for most people to grasp the problems with government spending because it comes in the form of numbers that no one person can really identify with in any meaningful way. You know that $459 billion is a lot of money. And it’s more money than you’ll ever see in your bank account (unless there’s one hell of a bank error in your favor), but just how that compares to trillions of dollars is out of the realm of the average person. So that’s why this video succeeds at putting the issue of the federal deficit in terms we can all understand: liquor.

8 thoughts on “Politics into a Language We All Understand”

  1. When I view it on the main page, it gives me some musical number from what looks like the 1950s.

    When I click on the article, the right video shows up.

  2. I have no idea what that’s about. It works perfectly on both pages for me. I even logged out of YouTube to see if is was something to do with my settings, but it’s the right video both places for me.

  3. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my 5-year-old daughter about this. I had to ask her to imagine some marbles: ten in a row, ten rows make a hundred, a stack of ten hundreds makes a nice cube of a thousand.

    Repeat with cubes of a thousand, you get a million. It would fit on our kitchen table.

    Repeat with cubes of a million, you get something about the size of our house.

    Repeat with that, and you get to a trillion!

  4. I’ve seen the video, and I like the perspective it gives! It’s nice to think that, after having fourteen shot-glasses of deficit spending (suddenly I realize how appropriate that is: Congress spending puts drunken sailors to shame!), the Republicans want to cut a draconian three-fourths of a shot glass.

    What’s really sad is that Obama just wants to freeze spending at current levels!

    Right after seeing it, my wife showed me an article about Obama’s “tough” budget cuts.

    I like these kinds of things, because it’s so easy to throw around numbers like 100 billion and 2 trillion and even 19 million, and lose all perspective of what they mean.

  5. I like the video but the dude needs to slow his speech if more people are to listen and learn. No way I can send this to my mother. She’d be constantly trying to rewind and replay to follow the run-on syllables.

    Sorry. Just think it would help more people if they could actually hear the words.

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