Demagogue

Donald Rumsfeld is advocating a round a military base closings and, as part of his advocacy, is promising that they will save the country money.

How much? That is kind of hard to determine, especially if you can't do multiplication

The closures will save the Pentagon more than $5 billion a year and will produce a net savings of $48 billion over 20 years, Rumsfeld said.

It seems to me that if closing bases is supposed to save us more than $5 billion a year, then after 20 years, we should probably save a little more than $48 billion.

In fact, after doing some complex calculations using a calculator with a multiplication function, I figured that we should save at least $100 billion. And using that calculator's division function, I figured out that $100 billion is more than twice as much as $48 billion.

But what do I know? The Pentagon is the one with all the experts and accountants.