AlgebraHut.com Blog

I was watching Fox News Sunday on July 4th (this past Sunday).  Please do not attempt to guess my political leanings from this admission, but I do enjoy watching Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.  I was disappointed this Sunday because Chris Wallace wasn’t hosting the show but had a substitute.  He does this from time to time.

I was happy to see the substitute wasn’t stony-faced Brit Hume, but was Major Garrett.  He didn’t do a bad job.  But he did ask a ridiculous question, a question also asked by Congress, of Kenneth Feinberg, the man in charge of the BP Restitution Fund.  News anchors and political pundits are full of ridiculous questions, but this one is related to math and many people may have missed the ridiculousness of the question.

Here is the clip:

$130 million is a lot of money in and of itself. I’ll never see that much money. So it might seem like something worth inquiring about.

However, relative to $20 BILLION, $130 million barely registers. So why make a stink about whether that $130 million counts toward the $20 billion? It makes little difference either way. It was a waste of time for Congress and Major Garrett to ask such a question.

To give you an idea of how little it matters compared to the total amount, look at it as a percentage. $130 million is only about one half of one percent of the total $20 billion! 1/2% is small potatoes.

To bring it back down to Earth (as opposed to numbers in the billions), 1/2% of $1000 is only FIVE BUCKS.

1/2% of $100 is FIFTY CENTS!

1/2% of $10 is a NICKEL! Isn’t it silly for congress and Major Garrett to worry about a NICKEL when they are trying to manage a ten spot?

Think of it this way:

Let’s suppose that, today, BP pledged to give $10 for every tarball found on the shores of the Gulf Coast states to date. But BP had already donated a nickel for each tarball.

So who would be concerned with the answer to this question: Are they going to count that nickel they already paid toward their new $10 pledge for each tarball? Apparently, Congress and Major Garrett.

Incidentally, I also noticed that this Hulu video had a funny tag on it:

None of the other videos had these tags. Too funny.

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin