And how long will it take to pay off the $1.4 trillion deficit (not counting things that aren’t included in the ‘budget’)? That’s $1.4 trillion for ’09 alone. And less than half the size of the tax increase over the next 10 years.
Support the Blog — Buy This Book!
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
Put this ad on your blog!
Syndicate
Subscribe to Main Blog feed here:
Subscribe to Comments too (below):
Junk Email Filter
That would be 1.5 million trillion pixels. Final answer.
And all we are left with is change. I guess he kept his campaign promise!
You have to be joking. It will never ever be paid off.
What does it equal?
Screwed.
No problem. We aren’t to big to fail. No nation ever has been and no nation ever will be. You put the people that think we can’t fail in charge and don’t understand why the US has been the strongest and most successful nation on Earth for about a 100 years and failure is guaranteed.
What the adults of today are going to leave to their children is an economic disaster area. We are acting in a completely irresponsible manner and the wealth that previous generations created is going to be squandered long before this generation is gone.
The really sad news is that the wretched masses aren’t going to have a clue how to recreate that wealth because their idea of success is not hustling wisely and meritocracy.
Their idea of how to succeed is to make those that are productive support those that aren’t in the manner to which they have become accustomed and like Harriett Thacher said the problem with that is sooner or later you run out of other people’s money to cover the bills.
did anyone mention the interest rate??
Don’t worry, Wanta has close to $70 trillion waiting in a Nigerian bank somewhere.
The european aristocracy have operated this way for ten centuries, and if I’m not mistaken are still riding fat on the pigs back. Don’t worry about the money, it will be forgiven and forgotten, in the absence of peasants just keep the American middle classes fed- they’re the only people silly enough to work, settle bills and pay taxes. Everything is going to be alright, just KBO.
In the last 10 years we just went through the greatest transfer of wealth in history: Real wages and their buying power went down, the rich and super-rich got richer while they got a tax cut, which they piddled away in formerly illegal banking schemes like credit default swaps and closed their US plants in favor of cheap Chinese labor, putting Americans out of work. Then it all went poof when those banking schemes went bust since banking regulation had been lifted by the Republicans so that they were not required to keep any reserves to cover potential losses and soften the blow should a crash occur. Thank Phil Gramm (R-TX) for all of that.
#11 ggore:
Who deregulated the banks?
(Here’s a hint: They share the same name, but he’s not George Clinton’s brother)
#12 moondawg
George Bush? Are You Really Sure?
That’s funny because it was Bill Clinton that signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 that deregulated the banks.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted in favor of it in huge numbers.
Bush and Congress sat on their collective thumbs and did little-to-nothing.
Now if you have links that show otherwise, please provide them, all the references I can find all say Clinton…
#1–Skeptic==I think in USA a trillion is 1000 Billion and a Billion is 1000 Million meaning there would be One.Five Million pixels in the above query.
I think I heard once that in Britain a Billion, or was it a Trillion, was not defined that way. Maybe that a Billion was a million million? but then why wouldn’t a Trillion be a Billion billion?
Things like this make space probes hit planets rather than go into orbit. Words—I gotta tell ya.
25 million….amount stolen by cyber criminals? Waaaaaaay off, like two orders of magnitude off.
#15: Maybe they meant 25 mil per month. Whatever, it does sound crazy low.
how long to pay it off, about a half a week if confiscate all the bounses of all of corporate america
And how long will it take to pay off the debt? === Easy. Just consult your hyper-inflation curve, ie–it won’t be done by repayment in like dollars.
I think the US government should have the treasury print off 15 special issue $1 Trillion dollar bills, featuring Curly from the Three Stooges as the picture.
And then give these $1 Trillion dollar bills to China and the other countries we owe shitloads of money to.
Debt paid.
And then, just have the government print out a shitload mountain of $1 Trillion dollar bills and give them to everyone.
Sure your retirement plan and stock values would be worth crapola, but at the same time think about how much more confident people would be in the economy.
All the fear would be gone because people would be too confused and perplexed trying to figure out WTF was going on!
This reminds me of John’s post with a Verizon CSR discussing about money 🙂 Someone please post a link to it cause it’s funny as heck 😀
The old saying goes: “Riches to Rags in Three Generations.”
The people running the show adopted the thinking of the children of the wealthy, that is, “Oh Daddy’s money will never run out, so there is nothing to worry about.”
Trust-fund baby thinking has taken over the minds of those in charge. We are doomed.
found it! 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt1w4iRNWLA
Re #14, bobbo, it was a trick question… one that I failed (and I think I dragged you into the same dimensional void). My initial answer was the assumption that the answer would be astronomical… to reinforce the notion of a huge US deficit. So I multiplied the million times the 1.5 trillion… without really thinking about it. In actual fact the answer is a puny 1500 pixels… 1.5 trillion divided by a million.
So… US citizens, I implore you to relax and take this all in stride. After all, you deficit is merely 1500 pixels. Just send an iPad to China… and tell them to keep the change.
Is this a test of how mathematical literate Dvorak readers are? If you have a 1200 x 1600 resolution monitor then it would take :
1,000,000,000,000 / (1200 x 1600) =
520,833 monitors to display a trillion pixels.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
–Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”, (Robert A. Heinlein)
I guess 1 out of 25 is the ratio here. 😉
± said, “it would take… 520,833 monitors to display a trillion pixels… Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.”
Well, um… sorry to break this to you, but the intention is not to show an area 1.5 trillion pixels. It’s to show a proportional representation of 1500 pixels representing 1.5 trillion dollars at 1 million dollars per pixel.
So, what species did you say you were partly?
(FYI… the original gif actually has 1.5 million pixels in the 1.5 trillion dollar area.)
#23 Theone, thanks man. Cracked me up.
Reminds me of the gal at Tim Horton’s yesterday. My bill came to $4.19. Gave her a $5 and 2 dimes. She couldn’t figure it out. She finally had to call the manager. At least this manager understood — one loonie and one cent.
U. Dave — nice graphic. Really puts it in perspective.
Bobbo, Skeptic,
my wife is a Brit. We have been married 25+ years and she recently realised that when I say a billion it’s a thousand million to her.
I really liked Bobbo’s analogy of missing/hitting the space rendevous. Kind of like the metric/imperial systems.
speaking of metric/imperial, remember the Gimli Glider
http://tinyurl.com/byhjh
Canucklehead, thanks for the Gimli link. I enjoyed that.
thats 15 million pixels. hell thats a lot of deficit.
sorry that 1.5 million pixels missed a point :p.
I cant wrap my head around 1.5 trillion dollars. ridiculous.