Billion?

The next time you hear a politician casually use the word "billion", carefully rethink having "politicians" spending YOUR tax money. A billion really is a difficult number to envision after all, but one advertising agency put the figure into perspective a few years ago.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes at the rate our government is spending our money.

In the US, one billion is one thousand million (i.e., it has 9 zeros and equals 1,000,000,000 or
109). A billion dollars in one dollar bills would make a pile of cash 20 feet tall, 31 ¼ feet wide, and over 50 feet long. A single stack of one dollar bills would be over 57 miles high! This is also what an elementary school class of 400 students can expect to earn in their entire lifetimes, combined! In the arcane world of finance and mathematics, the next magic number is “trillion”. OK, how big is a trillion? Well, in the U.S., one trillion is written as "1" followed by 12 zeros, or (1,000,000,000,000). One trillion seconds of clock time = (1012 sec) / ( 3.16 x 107 sec/yr) = 31,546 years! I think I’ll stop here, as my calculator doesn’t have enough digits to count this high!

The Outstanding Public Debt (National Debt) as of 26 Jul 2009 at 06:26:20 PM, GMT was $11,616,677,905,857, or, a bit more than eleven and a half trillion dollars. So, with the estimated population of the United States being three hundred and six million, each citizen's share of the national debt is $37,886.28. As an interesting side note, in 1791 our national debt was a bit over 75 million dollars. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, it was about two and a half billion dollars. Even with the tremendous expense of WW II, we owed “only” two hundred seventy billion dollars! So today we owe something like forty times as much!? I realize that the cold war was expensive, but really…

Now, with our current economic crunch, those miraculous people we send to Washington want to double even that ridiculous figure! Neil Barofsky, the Inspector General of the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” claims that the price tag for the bailout could reach $23.7 trillion! Apparently suffering from a touch of sticker shock, the senior Republican on the oversight committee (Rep. Darrell Issa) says, "If you spent a million dollars a day going back to the birth of Christ, that wouldn't even come close to just $1 trillion -- $23.7 trillion is a staggering figure." "The potential financial commitment the American taxpayers could be responsible for is of a size and scope that isn't even imaginable." Your tax dollars at work I presume…

At the county level our tax load works out to six or seven hundred dollars a head per year, depending on what the Commissioners have in mind for us in the next year. Outrageous I’d say, but for the most part we can see what we’re getting for our money, and I think most of us are “reasonably” satisfied. At the state level we get hooked for a bit more, with the 2008 tax bill averaging $3,670 per person. But still, we can see where much of that’s going as well, even though the folks in the statehouse don’t seem to know what a budget is. Then of course we have the federal government, where our congressmen (and women) vie for the “spendthrift of the year” award, and the president seems to think that money grows on trees! It’s funny though, back when I was a teenager my Dad often accused me of thinking that money grew on trees… then I had to start working for a living and my attitude changed. Perhaps we should try that with Washington… The universal health insurance plans all appear too complex and expensive to pass both houses. The cap-and-trade emissions bill with its huge costs that will have to be passed on to American producers and consumers seems like an act of national self flagration. The $787 billion stimulus bill has done absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, so we probably will need "Stimulus II" before long. With that track record, our representatives want to continue shoveling our money into the fire!? HELLO... WASHINGTON… Are your calculators broken??

(Incidentally, there’s an interactive “cap and trade” tax calculator on-line that will give you an idea of the new “hidden” taxes; http://www.taxfoundation.org/capandtrade )

In 1953 journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage" which opens with: "There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom." Garrett’s idea was that while America appeared the same, an internal revolution had taken place that was now irreversible. We had only need glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are now, and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers had set for our republic. Keep in mind that the bugaboo of taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were then a tax hating, liberty-loving people. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." When "Silent Cal" Coolidge left office in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of the entire gross domestic product. By 1932, Americans “trusting” government got us the beginnings of a very expensive social welfare program(s). Today however, even with seven out of ten Americans claiming they distrust government, Obama's first budget will swallow 28 percent of the entire GDP, while state and local governments grab another 15 percent. Even with overlap, government will still consume 40 percent of the GDP, approaching the highest WW II rate! And now Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts, and increase the income tax rate to nearly 40%. Combined state and local income taxes can run another 10%. If you’re self-employed, payroll taxes can add another 15% on the first $106,800 of wages of all workers. Medicare takes about 2.9 percent of all wages over that. Then there are sales taxes that can run to about 8%, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes, and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes, and soon I suspect, hot dogs, soft drinks, and probably ball game tickets!

So what did George III ever do that could compare with what our own government is doing today?