We Have Gone Mad

So the economy is in the tank. After spending $700 billion on the last bailout, the powers that be are proposing another $850 billion. Tucked into that $850 billion spending plan are such things as $4 billion for community organizations (read: ACORN) and $75 million for smoking cessation programs. What that spending has to do with "stimulus," the purported objective of the plan, is beyond me.



Let's think about how much money this is. It's a trillion and a half dollars in total, money that will be repaid by my children and grandchildren. Either that or the inflationary impacts of the bailout, and the ensuing tax policy, will make the payback affordable by eroding the value of the dollar so much that...well, we all know what happened in Germany as a result of the hyperinflation that followed WWI.

But let's put some context to it. The weight of one million one-dollar bills is a little more than 2000 pounds, or about the same weight as a large draft horse. The weight of one trillion one-dollar bills is more than 2,000,000,000 pounds, or about the same weight as the human populations of London, Washington and Singapore combined.

If you laid one million one dollar bills end to end, they would stretch about 100 miles. That's enough to reach from the Ohio Statehouse to the Sandusky Bay, or from Chicago to Milwaukee, or from Leeds to Leicester. If you laid one trillion one dollar bills end to end, they would reach the moon and back 200 times. Our you could send them in the direction of the sun and they'd go right past it, by about 5 million miles.

One trillion is an incomprehensibly large number. And that's why people don't understand the sheer magnitude of this so-called bailout. Not even the people who are foisting this on us.

Here is one more thing to think about. One million seconds is 12 days; one trillion seconds is roughly 32,000 years, which is about how long our lawmakers must think we have to pay for this shameful waste of resources.