John Boehner Killed a Lot of Trees to Make a Misleading Point..
November 10, 2009 by admin · View Comments
Is the healthcare bill really 1900 pages? To quote a famous government official, it all depends on what your definition of a page is.
As with everything in government, things that we are accustomed to out in the world don’t actually work the same way in government.
When most of us boot up Microsoft Word, we’re given a 12 point font and an 8.5 x 11 inch page that has one inch margins top, bottom, left, and right. When the bill printers in the capitol print a bill, it’s on an 8.5 x 11 inch paper, but nearly triple spaced, huge fonts, and a margin of 2 inches on the right and 1.75 inches on the left, with no more than 25 lines of text per page. See a random page from the healthcare bill below and click here to see it full size:
So if the bill was placed in a word processor that you and I use every day, what would it look like? This morning I embarked on two experiments. The first was to paste the bill unformatted into a text editor. The resulting document? 206 pages.
But to be more realistic I went to the printer friendly display on the Library of Congress’ Thomas Site, saved it out as html, and opened it in Microsoft Word. The result? Only 506 pages.
John Boehner sure did kill a lot of trees unnecessarily to make his point didn’t he? Just another example of the twisted facts and mass hysteria some are inciting to block a bill designed to help people.
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