From xkcd.com/

This isn’t exactly timely, except that President Obama recently “challenged” his cabinet to reduce the budget by $100 million dollars.

Let’s not mess around: $100 mil is a lot of money. But it’s a drop in the bucket – no, it’s one of the droplets from the spash of a drop in the bucket – of the President’s budget, which is weighing in at $3.6 trillion.

To make it visual, that’s $3,600,000,000,000. But at some point all of those zeros blur together. Think of it this way: if you received $1 every ten minutes since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, you still would only have about $3.4 trillion.

And to get a hundred million? You’d only need to get a $1.54 every year. This isn’t a budget reduction. A former advisor to President Bush “compared it to cutting spending by $3 a year in a $100,000 family budget.” Pres. Obama says this:

“None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively they would make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone,” Obama said. “And so what we’re going to do is line by line, page by page, $100 million there, $100 million here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money.”

But what kind of tone do you set with such a small number? The tone tells me that even the president has no concept of how big these numbers are. And how many lines will he have to go through? How many $100 millions? In order to make  a 1% reduction in the budget, he’ll have to find and elimnate $100 million 360 times.

Maybe he should challenge the the cabinet to cut $100 mil a day for a year, and then we’ll only be looking at a totally manageable deficit of $1.4 trillion.