A Trillion Reasons to Wake Up
Do you ever contemplate numbers like a million, a billion or a trillion? I’m guessing that most of us don’t. Otherwise, when it’s announced the government is spending billions of dollars on a war or trillions of dollars are missing from the Pentagon, you’d be hounding your representatives for an explanation. Or wondering why the “liberal media” isn’t crowing about it every night on the news.
Part of the problem is the way the words sound to our ears. It’s a nice, incremental progression: million … billion … trillion. Almost soothing, just like one … two … three, or at worst, tens … hundreds … thousands. If we take a moment to put it to practical application, you’ll see the perverse, unforgivable wastefulness we allow daily by not considering the full ramification of these numbers.
Let’s say, you make enough money to save one hundred thousand dollars a year. That doesn’t sound too bad, huh? I could live pretty comfortably on a salary of a hundred thousand dollars, but in this little thought experiment, you are keeping that much, free and clear. Even without interest, in ten years you’ve saved a million dollars! Hurray! Good for you! But don’t light that cigar with a sawbuck just yet.
Next step, save one billion dollars, right? Continuing our abovementioned scenario, how long would it take you to become a billionaire? That’s right–ten thousand years. A billion is a thousand millions, so if it takes you ten years to save a million, it’s going to take you ten thousand years to fatten that nest egg and attain billionaire status. That’s considerably longer than the average Baptist believes the world has been in existence. Bill Gates, with a current estimated worth around 56 billion dollars, must have a real backache, if he keeps that chunk of change under his mattress. And he should thank God every day he didn’t have to wait 560,000 years to accumulate it, as he would if he were playing our little game here.
So, you see where this is going, right? Using this same rate of increase, when will you be a trillionaire? Just a scant ten million years. To give you some perspective, ten million years ago, scientists believe mammoths first started wandering around, thankful for their woolly coats. According to current evolutionary theory, the entirety of hominid evolution (us and our ancestors) could have occurred twice over in that period. Do you think, even if we had evolved twice over, very many of us monkey-boys would have comprehended these large numbers, our economy and our runaway government? Probably not.
Bush just got authorization to drop another 100 billion dollars in Iraq, in a war creeping up on a half a trillion dollars in cost, much of it borrowed. The ignoble Rumsfeld, before his resignation, announced that the Pentagon can’t account for 2 or 3 trillion dollars. Let’s say all this money–3.5 trillion dollars for argument’s sake–was distributed evenly to the US population (300 million). Every American man, woman and child would receive a check pretty close to twelve thousand dollars. Family of four gets about forty-eight thousand dollars. I bet you could use that money about now.
Let alone the illegality of the war in Iraq; forget the immorality and waste of maintaining a military so big that it’s easy to lose trillions of dollars–have you contacted your senators and congressmen, demanding an accounting for these funds? Have you told them you expect extensive investigations and multiple heads to roll because of it? Have you told them to spend that kind of money on our country? Have you demanded a rollback in tax cuts for the wealthy?
Are you mad enough yet to act? Why not?