A Trillion Dollar Financial Rescue Plan
Posted in In General on September 29th, 2008

The nearly trillion dollar financial rescue plan is so far beyond the understanding of the average American that most of us are lost listening to the debate. The average American worker pulls in approximately $28,000 per year when they are twenty five and retires around age 65 when they are making around $42,000 per year. At their peak earning capacity, the average American worker would have to work 23,809,523 years and 8 months to earn one trillion dollars and that doesn’t take into account money spent for beer, hamburgers and child support. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. Somebody that smokes might understand a trillion dollars better than a non-smoker; after all, they spend $5 bucks for a pack of cigarettes and then burn them up. Those of us who can’t see spending money in a pursuit like that can’t hope to understand a figure like $1,000,000,000,000.00. With the population of the United States sitting at 305,291,131 people, a trillion dollars would represent $3,275.56 per person. It represents $7,246.37 for every person registered on the U.S. tax rolls and $56,384.27 for every American citizen old enough to vote in an election. If you won a trillion dollars at a casino you and your next six generations would probably spend their entire lifetimes just trying to truck it all home. One Trillion dollars in one dollar bills would weigh approximately 1,100,000 U.S. tons. Thanks to the Internet’s never ending supply of useful information I have found that if you laid one trillion one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills. $1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. If you had a trillion dollars to spend and were required to spend it at the rate of one million dollars a day it would take you 2,737 years to go broke. If you counted to a trillion out loud, one number per second, it would take you the next 31,688 years to complete the task.

The 2008 Economic Stimulus package which cost the American taxpayers around $168 billion, was a drop in the bucket by comparison. You might vaguely recall the $600.00 check you got from the IRS earlier this year when the government sent them out to boost the economy around the same time that the price of unleaded gas was sailing past the $4.00 per gallon mark. The IRS said that nearly 130 million people qualified for one of those $600 checks and if you do the math it shows that they spent around $90 billion dollars processing and mailing out around $78 billion dollars worth of $600 checks. This may be a good indication of why we are now witnessing the collapse of our economy. This time we are going for an even trillion dollars but there won’t be any checks to the tax payers. Instead we will end up writing one to them. If this were a really fair arrangement we should at least be allowed to print our own money to pay them with like they do for us.

Unfortunately, the people who will be getting these one trillion dollars are people that we universally dislike - the bill collectors. Furthermore, these bill collectors are being given this amazing sum of money because they can’t squeeze the money out of the people they’ve loaned it to. Granted, my perspective may be rather simplistic but I fail to see why their incompetence should become a burden for generations of Americans yet to come. Even if there are stupid government regulations requiring them to loan money to low income people there is still a major distinction between low income and no income, and if they loaned money to people who could never hope to pay it back that shouldn’t be our problem.

I’m still not too clear on just how this thing is supposed to work. Say I am a lender, and I’ve loaned Tom, Dick and Harry each $500,000 to buy a house despite none of them having a job. They can’t make the payments and I’m over the barrel for the one and half million bucks I loaned to these deadbeats. The government comes in and gives me a $1.5 million dollar bailout check to keep me afloat. I foreclose the mortgages on Tom, Dick and Harry’s three houses and put them back on the market where I eventually sell them for $1.5 million. Now I have $3 million. The taxpayers are out $1.5 million, Tom, Dick and Harry are drunk on cheap wine and living on the street in Los Angeles, but I’m out buying a new boat for myself and a pink Mercedes for my 16 year old daughter. This sounds like a pretty good deal for the people getting the money, but in the grand scheme of things, it sort of reminds me of a shell game. Tails I win, heads you lose. Obviously this is another example of why we pay politicians so much money. It takes a special sort of mind to come up with stuff like this and thankfully we are not all capable of doing the job.

When I was a kid my dad always gave the same answer to every question regarding a potential new expense. He had it down so good that it seemed like some sort of instinctual thing, possibly genetic. It didn’t matter who was asking or what the money was for the answer always came out the same because there are only do many ways to say “no.â€