51% lets you censor transactions. You need more than that to reverse a week old tx. Way more. You have to outrun the rest of the world and gain a week of advantage. So if you have 90% of the hashrate, you go 9 times faster than the honest miners. Every day, you can erase 9 days of blockchain. But that 90% means that you build a mining farm that is 9 times greater that the current hashrate. Redo the math on the costs and logistics of that.

Doesn't mean it's easy to get approval to spend that "smidge" on an attack.

"smidge over 1%"

It's not easy, but it's not impossible (to parent's bombastic assertion).

I believe the Manhattan project spent something like 0.55% of the US military budget (against ~2013USD$900b yearly budgets, which seemed the peak in 1942-45).

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/smidge

Because it had hard-won political approval; a bitcoin attack would face similar barriers.

And I know what smidge means, I was expressing ire at your attempt to sound folksy.

Fwiw, I'm actually pretty folksy.