Wednesday, June 08, 2011

A handy illustration...

Now that government financial figures are expressed in numbers normally only used by astronomers or Zimbabwean ATM's, with a couple of digits that make sense followed by a vapor trail of zeroes that beggars the imagination, it's time to draw on some of those "If the Earth was a pea at home plate, then Jupiter would be..." analogies that they use for the kiddies down at the planetarium.

Fat In Indiana brings a handy one:
Here is the Debt: $14,500,000,000,000. That is triple what it was three years ago.

To better understand this amount, I have tried to shrink these huge amounts into a monetary figure I could grasp. Let us say a million dollars is the same as having a penny in your pocket...
You should RTWT.
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8 comments:

  1. If average people were able to wrap their minds around the numbers, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

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  2. Tam - have you seen just how bad Blogger links suck when posted to facebook? Every so often I really want to link your posts to my fb and the lead-in text of your post (and any Blogger post) just isn't there. With posts like today's, it such a waste as it's what'll get the click throughs. Althouse finally got religion and is leaving Blogger. Maybe you should considered it for many this and other reasons. Just sayin...

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  3. You sure about the debt tripling?

    The deficit has tripled(not sure about that, but seems the rough figure), not the debt.

    Bush exited office with a measly 10-11 trilion debt or so....

    Here is a handy chart

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/78/US_Debt_Trend.svg/463px-US_Debt_Trend.svg.png

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  4. It was the deficit that tripled.

    I was quoting someone else. You should go read the post and comments.

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  5. What's that plot supposed to be showing? If that's supposed to show debt as percent of GDP, it's seriously wrong - that's virtually 100%.

    Both of those numbers look wrong to me. It looks too big to be deficit and too small to be debt.

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  6. Yesterday's USAToday had a front page article on the debt subject. The figure quoted was $540,000 debt for every household in the country. That, even the Clettii can wrap their heads around.

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  7. I think it's useful to think of government spending, debt, deficits, etc. by US household; those are numbers I can relate to. There are roughly 100,000,000 households in US(http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html); so the division is pretty easy. $14 Trillion in debt is $140,000 per US household. $2 Trillion in revenues is $20,000, $3.6 Trillion in spending is $36,000. The problem becomes apparent pretty quickly, and I think is understandable by most people. I'm not sure where US Today got their numbers.

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