I realize that everyone around here in the office is all in bunches about the ITEXPO which ended yesterday. Chatter around the water cooler is that it was a success and VoIP is Alive and Well. Needless to say I didn't go, I was too worried about the deficit!
Reading a report on CNN.com the story highlights nearly sent me into cardiac arrest.
- One trillion stacked dollars would reach nearly 60,000 miles, 1/3 way to moon
- Professor: You couldn't spend $1 trillion if you spent $1M a day since Jesus' birth
- All financial market interventions, loans, bailouts total more than $7 trillion
Excuse me Christine Romans of CNN's American Morning? (You have to give credit where credit is due, you know.)
Ok the first one, I'm a visual person so I would have to actually take a trip up to the moon and have a marker saying that's where a trillion dollars ends, the second...he's pictured below and quite frankly I want to know if he traveled in his time machine and met Jesus too. But the last one was the scariest of them all, SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS. My grandkids are screwed.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks that the American public has become desensitized to just how much money that is.
Well of course we're desensitized when Wall Street is over there taking 20 billion dollars in bonuses and acting like Joe the Plummer gets such a bonus annual will make people a little numb.
McConnell goes on to say, "To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion."
CNN did some checking of McConnell's numbers with noted Temple University math professor and author John Allen Paulos. (Professor Paulos, you know I'm just kidding...you don't have a time machine, yet.)
"A million dollars a day for 2,000 years is only three-quarters of a trillion dollars. It's a big number no matter how you slice it," Paulos said.
Here's another way to look at it.
"A million seconds is about 11½ days. A billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years," Paulos said. "People tend to lump them together, perhaps because they rhyme, but if you think of it in terms of a jail sentence, do you want to go to jail for 11½ days or 32 years or maybe 32,000 years? So, they're vastly different, and people generally don't really have a real visceral grasp of the differences among them."
No sir, we do not. President Obama what's the story! I mean it's great that you delayed the digital TV turnover but how are we going to pay our cable and electric bills if we're seven trillion dollars in debt.
"'Number' itself can be parsed 'number' or 'numb-er.' And maybe in this case, the latter is a better pronunciation," Paulos said. "I think to some extent, we have ... evolved in a context where such big numbers were completely foreign."
Perhaps a better way to get a "grasp of the numbers," Paulos said, is to use them to describe the budgets of government programs.
"The Environmental Protection Agency's, for example, annual budget is about $7.5 billion. So, a trillion dollars would fund the EPA in present dollars for 130 years. Or the National Science Foundation or National Cancer Institute has budgets of five or six billion dollars. You could fund those for almost 200 years," he said.
The economic problem can only be fixed by Americans spending money to stimulate the economy. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has called it "the mother of all crises."
No one wants to spend money! With tax season upon us, people would rather save their returns then go out and irresponsibly spend it on a new plasma TV.
With reports from various companies informing the public of their woes:
Others have been lucky:
The fact still remains my friends, we are all deep in the pity party, seven trillion dollars deep.
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