{"id":8356,"date":"2011-03-20T10:53:15","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T14:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8356"},"modified":"2011-03-20T10:53:15","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T14:53:15","slug":"a-different-way-to-visualize-the-proposed-us-budget-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/03\/20\/a-different-way-to-visualize-the-proposed-us-budget-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"A different way to visualize the proposed US budget cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jon sent me an interesting link on a different way to visualize the relative size of the proposed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives\/2011\/03\/028631.php\" target=\"_blank\">budget cuts<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent?<\/p>\n<p>The arithmetic is pretty simple, due to the extensive nutrition information that McDonalds makes available online. A Big Mac Extra Value Meal has three components: a Big Mac, a large order of french fries, and a medium soda. The McDonalds site tells us that a Big Mac has 540 calories, a large fries has 570 and a medium Coke has 210, for a total of 1,320 calories.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the federal budget is currently around $3.8 trillion, which means that a $6 billion cut represents one 633rd of the total. What would be an equivalent cut in a Big Mac Extra Value Meal?<\/p>\n<p>One variable is not readily available online; that is, how many french fries are there in a large order? To answer that question, I went to a nearby McDonalds at lunch time, paid for a large order of fries, and counted them. There were 87. (I counted fries regardless of size, but did not count the hard bits in the bottom of the container.)<\/p>\n<p>This allows us to complete the calculation. If there are 570 calories in a large order of fries, and 87 fries per order, each french fry, on the average, contains 6.5 calories. One 633rd of the total calorie content of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is 1,320\/633, or 2.1 calories. That equals almost exactly one-third of an average sized french fry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jon sent me an interesting link on a different way to visualize the relative size of the proposed budget cuts: That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent? The arithmetic is pretty [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,53,13],"tags":[158,697,698,71],"class_list":["post-8356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-budget","tag-congress","tag-debt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2aM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8357,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356\/revisions\/8357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}