Fun With Numbers

It gets to a point with numbers that you start to lose your sense of perspective and relation, especially with money. I can relate to and understand $100,000. I can even relate to one million or one hundred million. But after a point, we start to lose our reference point and it turns into monopoly money and politicians know that. Does $400B dollars really feel twice as big as $200B? Not to me. It's lost perspective. So, it's important to express these numbers in something we can relate to.

Obama's $825B "emergency" stimulus plan (I put "emergency" in quotations because only 3% spent in the first year isn't much of an emergency) is like spending:

$1,000,000 a day for the next 2,260 years.

Yes, that's right. The next 2,260 years. One million dollars. Every day. From now until the year 4269. 4269.

Not enough? Try buying this 14 bedroom, 18 bathroom, 33,000 sq. ft. home in Park City, Utah every hour, on the hour, for the entire length of Obama's first term.
















That's spending $23,500,000 over 35,000 times. That's a lot of 23-million dollar mansions. Enough to give every single Senator and Congressional Representative a mansion in each state and still have over eight thousand mansions left over.

Crazy big numbers. Keep them in perspective.

YFNN

Week One Under the Messiah

Summary of week one under the rule of "the chosen one".

1) Has his preacher friend declare that whites are racists for him.
2) States his intent to implement national gun control.
3) Pisses off press corps by not answering questions and talking down to them.
4) Acts like a jackass to the Senate minority whip.
5) Appoints Nancy Pelosi as dictator of national fuel economy standards.
6) Announces closure of terrorist retention facility.
7) States intent to pull out of Iraq ahead of schedule.

I just can't get enough change.

YFNN

Direction or Misdirection?

Recently, economist and policy analyst Stephen Moore did an interview with a well-circulated newsletter that I occasionally read. He's is the author of the new book "The End of Prosperity" (linky-linky) and an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. He is very well educated and was the senior economist for the the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, so he definitely knows what he's talking about. I found this segment of the interview particularly interesting and certainly timely as we start a new era with a president and congress bound and determined to try to regulate, socialize, and tax this country into prosperity:

“The 1990’s was a great decade. Our book (The End of Prosperity) describes when Reagan came in with a new kind of supply-side pro-free-market philosophy- turning around, by the way, the worst decade of the century other than the Great Depression, which was the 1970’s.

Amazingly , the left is rewriting the history of the 70’s: “If only we hadn’t had Reaganomics, we could go back to those wonderful years of the 1970’s”- when we had gas lines and 25% mortgage interest rates and 14% inflation.”

In any case, Reagan did two things. He cut tax rates very significantly from 70% all the way down to 28%. And he slayed inflation. The inflation rate went from 14.5% down to 3%. We had the greatest boom for 25 years in the history of civilization. No country had ever seen anything like what happened in American from the early 1980’s through 2007. We created $40 trillion dollars of net new wealth over that period. It was an awesome experiment in prosperity.

Now, Bill Clinton’s tax increase did hurt the economy, The evidence is that in the first two years in the Clinton Administration, the economy actually slowed down. But once you had the Republican Revolution in 1994, once you had the combination of Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey running the Congress, then Clinton moved back to the right. That’s when he gave his speech, “the era of big government is over.”

We had welfare reform, we had the capital gains tax cut, we balanced the budget. Those were all pro-growth Reagan ideas.

But a lot of the economists that I talk to in the Obama camp look at that period and say, “Look, we can raise taxes through the roof and its not going to hurt the economy.”

That’s a very dangerous idea at a time when the rest of the world is going the other way. China, Sweden, India, my goodness, Russia has a 13% flat tax. How are we going to compete with them with a 40% income tax? It’s a really dangerous idea to be talking about raising taxes right now in the face of the worst economy we’ve had in 25 years.”

Ah, the 70's. I'm so glad I was just a baby during the vast majority of them, especially the Carter years. I think my head would have exploded. I just hope the new prez doesn't take us the same direction.

YFNN