Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the absurdity of making minor cuts in funding to resolve larger financial issues.
Neil Degrasse Tyson uses an analogy comparing the insignificant reduction of funding for PBS to deleting small text files on a large hard drive to create space. This highlights how trivial actions may not substantially impact larger budgetary problems, suggesting that more meaningful solutions are necessary for effective financial management.
In practice
Using this quote in a debate about government spending can illustrate the inefficacy of trivial budget cuts.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.
Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.
In our society, as people pass out of young adulthood, they tend to relate to themselves more in terms of what they are no longer than what they are now, and that's psychologically low-grade devastating.
The more completely we focus our attention on our Creator and Lord, the less chance there is of our being distracted by creatures.
I was the Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade, but Jane Roe has been laid to rest.
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