The last few days I have heard the words “trillion dollars” bandied about like it meant a dollar. Just what is a trillion? How many of us have tried to fathom what a trillion dollars is? I like to break things down into terminology that I can understand. I worked for over fifty years, and my lifetime salary approached something like three million dollars. Sounds like alot doesn’t it? Well I earned that much over a fifty six year period. A very significant portion (about $800,000.00)of that salary went to pay taxes to the state and federal governments. At this moment the federal government is considering spending seven hundred and fifty billion dollars to correct a mistake they created.
A trillion is the number “one” followed by twelve zeros ($1,000,000,000,000.00). Lets break that down to something more basic. Lets say that you turned twenty-one years old today, and because of new technology we know you will live to one hundred. That translates into seventy nine years or 28,835 days of life. How lucky you are. Now lets divide a trillion dollars by twenty eight thousand eight hundred and thirty five days. The answer is thirty four million six hundred eighty thousand and seventy six ($34,680,076.00) per day, or one million four hundred forty five thousand and three ($1,445,003.00) per hour 24/7. Do you really think you could spend that much? Think about it. It took me fifty six years to earn three million dollars, and I had a very nice life. Sure I could have used more money, but I can’t imagine spending thirty four million in my lifetime much less spending it every day for seventy nine years.
Here is another way to put the number one trillion. Lets say that we wanted to buy a nice double wide manufactured home for some of the poor people in this country. How many could we buy if they cost one hundred thousand dollars a piece? Are you ready for the answer, ten million.
The whole reason for the sub prime mortgage fiasco was to lower the lending rules so poor people could buy homes. Well the program exceeded our expectations. It is costing us nearly a trillion dollars. I think the government would have been smarter to give each poor family a manufactured home. Think of the jobs that would have created. Making that many houses takes alot of effort. With four people living in each of these homes we could have housed forty million people, over ten percent of the population. Instead, we have people losing their homes, banks going out of business, and our country is at risk of a “great” depression. The politicians are pointing at the greed of Wall Street as the root cause. The Feds created two organizations for the purpose of creating investment vehicles for investors. They really got iinto the “greed” thing and decided it was great scam so they hid thousands of known bad loans into packages that were sold to banks and to investors. Sure the investors were greedy, I am too when it comes to my pension. What I nor anyone else knew is that our glorious leaders were pirates. Many politicians profited from this effort also. The “Wonder Man” BO was among them. By the way, BO is also connected to the invention of the entire scheme.
This great program to become socialist is going to cost each one in the population twenty eight hundred and fifty seven dollars($2857.00). That means me, you, your wife, and each of your kids, etc. for every single member of the 350,000,000 population.
I happen to think I can do better with my money than to give it to Uncle Sam to pay for his mistakes. I sure don’t want to give the responsibility of spending trillions to a socialist leaning BO.
Filed under: Election, family, Government, Lions Club, Motivation, politics, Writer | Tagged: depression, manufactured home, poor, socialism, sub-prime, taxes, trillion | 4 Comments »
