In my “working days” when one of my projects needed money that hadn’t been budgeted, I found that when I went to the boss or the board it was always easier to get more money than less. If I indicated that I needed $5000 or even $500 to complete a project, I was deluged with questions about how it was to be used, why didn’t I foresee the need for it earlier and on and on. However, if I needed $5 million for the project, I got the usual grumbling but not near the number of questions. The fact is it was easier to ask for more money.
I attribute this to the fact that $500 means something to most people — but most people really can’t comprehend larger amounts, like $5M. Most people are not very good at comprehending large numbers. Each year at Antietam they light a candle for each causality of the battle – about 25,000. I thought I had an idea of the magnitude of the number 25,000. The first time we went there for the luminary event, I had trouble comprehending what I saw. I think most people have a handle on numbers and quantities until some arbitrary number is reached and then their brains default to “a lot,” “a bunch.” “gargantuan,” “humongous” or some such description of something incomprehensible. Once a person reaches that number, it’s almost impossible to get past it.
Now, all that aside, on to the subject of this blog — the National debt. Ever since I can remember, its been big, humongous or whatever term you’d like to use. It always seemed fairly serious to me — I know if I owe money, I worry about it. But apparently most people, and certainly the people in Washington aren’t terribly concerned. The reason, I think, is that no one can begin to comprehend the magnitude of the problem. Most people’s minds can’t comprehend numbers in the trillions. I’m guessing here, but I’d bet that no person, organization, or country has ever had a debt as large as the U.S. does today – ever – in the history of the world!
I’m not sure what the National debt is — it’s gone up since I started writing, but it’s at least $15 or $16 trillion. The media tries to explain it using examples like, if you spent a dollar a second, $15 trillion would last close to 470.000 years, or if you turned $15 trillion into a stack of thousand dollar bills, it would reach over 943 miles. Another interesting observation that attempts to put these huge numbers in perspective — if you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would take you until October 2737 to lose a trillion dollars — and our debt is many trillions. I haven’t done the math, but I bet these scary examples are fairly accurate — the problem is it’s still hard to relate to the numbers. It’s a serious problem and Washington takes long weekends….
I don’t have an answer, but I blame everyone in Washington. Everyone should blame them and maybe we ought to work on that number thing — a trillion is a lot; 16, 17 or 18 trillion is mind boggling.
Even if we can’t get our head around the numbers, we should all agree that this is a serious issue. Maybe if we can just equate it to our not being able to pay our American Express bill it will become ‘real’ to us. Thomas Jefferson once said that if he could add just one more amendment to the Constitution it would be a complete ban on all borrowing by the federal government. Think things would be different today if we’d taken his advice?
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