Carl Sagan never said it. Billions and Billions of stars. Not exactly. Not like that. But it became part of the collective consciousness for anyone who had seen Cosmos. The show ran for thirteen episodes in 1980 and explored life on Earth and our place in the universe. It was the most-watched PBS show ever, according to AI chatbots.
Billions and billions. He wrote a book with that in the title. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. He talked about the billions and billions spent on the Cold War. But he never said “billions and billions of stars.”
“There are in fact one hundred billion galaxies, each of which contain something like one hundred billion stars.” Ten quadrillion, give or take.
And James Cagney never said, “You dirty rat, you killed my brother,” but he’s been misquoted, perhaps billions of times. Oh, and the media is lying about the billions spent to shrink the US government, and I’m sure plenty of people, mostly stupid left-wing people, are repeating that.
As part of the DOGE project, the Trump Administration offered what amounted to paid leave if you quit the US government for good. Severance is the traditional term. We need to make some cuts. Thank you for your service, or not. We’ll pay you for [insert time frame] so you can look for other work or sit on your ass playing Call of Duty. We don’t care. At the end of the severance, your pay and benefits end.
If you believe the Handmaids in the media, the cost was between $6.7 and $9.5 billion. Your hard-earned dollars. Money that could have gone to ungrateful immigrants running a learning center or another California train to nowhere. Wasted. How dare you. We could have housed even more ungrateful immigrants, filled a few EBT cards, or opened a Burrito stand hospice.
What did we get instead?
That one-time investment, meant to help those hard-working public servants (the left supposedly loves) pay their bills while they found other employment, will save the same taxpayers who paid it an estimated 20 billion a year, every year after.
Senate Democrats are saying the 20 billion figure is sketchy, but how sketchy, and why would it matter? If the 6.7 billion figure is real, the total annual savings will be more. The severance was for six months max, and most of them would have been less. Not everyone signed up on day one, but if the total cost were just 6.7 billion, then taxpayers would save $6.7 billion times two every year those government employees are off the books, plus the cost of annualized raises and the increased cost to house them, keep them warm, power their offices, phone lines, internet, and whatever else.
Let’s call it 15 billion or 150 billion every ten years.
Couch cushion money in the grand scheme of government spending, but even 150 billion counts, and before long you’re talking about serious savings. Like the 5.6 billion a year saved because the Feds unplugged businesses engaged in food stamp fraud. The hundreds of billions saved by de-certifying fraud across every welfare stream, which is adding up to trillions.
Trillions in annual theft that, for the record, Democrats didn’t want found. They fought the investigations, lied about the savings, and continue to make the case that regular Americans are being harmed, which isn’t true because the savings came as a result of ending fraud.
The only people harmed were American taxpayers and possibly Democrat politicians if they were somehow benefiting from the fraud.
That’s a much better headline, by the way, but not one you’ll see in the Handmaiden media.
