This week I am overwhelmed by the numbers. I like numbers, but these are so large. Huge. Ginormous, as one friend would say.
Let’s look only at two of them: Chrysler and the interest on the U.S. National Debt.
You may have recently read that Chrylser lost $2 billlion for the last quarter. Ho-hum. So what? It is not like this means anything to us. Corporations lose money all the time but somehow manage to stay in business. Sometimes they even come back making a profit, and a rather large one at that.
So what does $2 billion mean?
By losing $2,000,000,000 in one quarter (91 days), the company lost $22 million each day, $915,000 per hour, and $15,000 per minute. How quickly can Chrylser make a $15,000 car? Can it do it in a minute? If not, the company lost more money every minute than it could have even produced in vehicles. Something does not sound quite right.
Chrysler’s woes are child’s play compared to the National Debt. Ah, the National Debt. Someone actually maintains a clock that ticks away relentlessly showing our hopeless corporate indebtedness. At nearly $9 trillion, we are told that such a number translates into a per capita bill of $29,222, give or take a few bucks.
The “interest” which the U.S. government pays yearly is about $400 billion. It is the third-largest budget expense category behind only national defense and income redistribution. How large is this number?
If you started paying $1,000 per second as soon as you read this article, it would take you until year 2287 to pay off the “finance charge” for our national credit card. That is almost 280 years, which is longer than our country has existed. Are you scared yet? I’m petrified.
What can we learn from this? For one thing, we know that our great…great grandchildren’s lives are fairly well-mortgaged. Secondly, we can now appreciate how quickly numbers add up whenever we are working with anything of national proportions.
Many people have observed that government has no money of its own. It is all taxpayer money. Which means it comes from the people. It belongs to you and me or, in this case of debt, it used to belong to us. It is long gone, like a Barry Bonds home run exiting the ballpark and landing in the San Francisco Bay.
I would love to end this article on an upbeat note. It is patently unfair for me, your author, to drop this news unceremoniously without hope of remedy.
By now, you have read enough to know that this is a big issue. Lots of money is involved. Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is to examine the cost per citizen -- the $29,222 I mentioned earlier.
Our best solution is to pay that amount for ourselves, and any children for whom we are financially responsible. If we can pay $1,000 a month, and I know that may be hard for some of you, but be frugal (it is for the national good, after all), we can pay off the national debt in two years, five months, and seven days.
That does not sound too bad, does it?
Unfortunately, I neglected to add the $1.38 billion that the debt increases daily, or a mere $1.2 trillion during the 877 days we would be paying off our debt.
I guess I need to go back to the drawing board.
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Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 575 words.
© May, 2007