Thursday, April 30, 2009

Behavioral Scientists and President Obama

Obama regularly consults with behavioral scientists to determine how to craft his messages to the American people. Recently, they affirmed that average citizens have a hard time really understanding big numbers, which is why FairKaye always writes out all of the zeros instead of just saying billion or trillion.

Thus, last week he made a big point of “saving” $100,000,000 from the budgets of his cabinet members by such methods as shopping in bulk for office supplies. According to his mentors, voters would be impressed because they remember 100 million as a big number in contrast to say 3.5 trillion, or 3,500,000,000,000. Here is a video demonstration that drives home the insignificance of his “cuts” versus his spending proposals.

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