Tuesday, February 07, 2006

An Amusing Analogy

If it's not the latte, it's the peanut butter!

By Gene Sperling
Feb. 14, 2005 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine the following: The father of a
financially stretched family decides to live it up by leasing three
fully loaded Hummer H1s for the bargain price of $9,750 a month.
As the family's financial situation deteriorates, the father
calls the family together for a belt-tightening discussion. He
holds up a jar of Whole Foods chunky peanut butter and says, "Do
you realize we are spending $4.49 on this? We could be saving $2.04
if we bought Skippy peanut butter for only $2.45."
His teenage son responds, "Like, dad, man, why are you
busting us about two bucks on peanut butter when you're spending,
like, almost $10,000 a month on cars?" The father sternly
responds, "Don't change the subject. We are talking about peanut
butter."

[full article]

2 comments:

Bitty said...

Thanks for posting that.

Not so amusing, actually. :(

Listening to a story about this on NPR yesterday, I was struck by two additional facts:

1. The amount in the budget for the war is not sufficient to cover the year's war cost. The intent apparently is to go back to Congress for "emergency" money later. Hence, a very dishonest representation of what the war costs is built into the budget.

2. The talk about reducing the deficit by half by 2009 is an apples-and-oranges discussion. While we ordinary, peanut-butter- buying folk think that means the deficit will get smaller, that's totally untrue. In dollars, the deficit will continue to increase. I'm going on memory here, so if my statement is inaccurate, I apologize. The "half" refers to (I think) the percentage of the GNP that the deficit represents. So the plan is to reduce that percentage by half. But keep spending.

Eventually we won't even be able to afford peanut butter.

Anonymous said...

His brother Jeb is cutting property taxes in Florida which would give back 80 bucks to an average person, but 300,000 to the rich.