Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, called it "a colossal reversal of New York State's commitment to providing every child with a real opportunity to learn".
Their combined cushion of $83 billion – the capital that their regulator requires them to hold – underpins a colossal $5 trillion in debt and other financial commitments.
According to Paula Akugizibwe, Advocacy Coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa, "the colossal funding gap will test the strength of African governments' rhetorical commitments to the fight against HIV".
That will impose colossal financial burdens in a country already struggling to meet its pension commitments to the elderly.
Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments.
Still, it "reflects our commitment to sustainable thinking", says the manufacturer of extremely green automobiles (and colossal, gas-guzzling Chelsea tractors).
The colossal economic mismanagement of the final decades of PRI rule has mutated into a dogged commitment to stability.
