Brother, can you spare 40,280,000,000,000 dimes?

-by Woid


Fun with numbers dept.

You know that $700,000,000,000 our country seems to have mislaid somewhere? That's nothing.

In the past year, you and I have spent a total of $4.28 TRILLION on the "financial crisis"--more than the U.S. spent on all of World War II. 

Hey, 700 billion here, 700 billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

We went to the moon for $237 billion. The New Deal cost $500 billion. The entire War of Terror (as Borat calls it)-- including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-- comes to less than $600 billion.

And just now we've allocated that $700 billion (a starter payment... this may turn out to be one of those balloon deals), gift-wrapped for those same wonderful people who wrecked the markets and the economy in the first place-- with no strings attached. I believe they're spending it on money clips.

It's easier to say "four trillion," but that's a hell of a rounding error. The 28 to the right of the decimal point is enough by itself to pay for putting a man on the moon in the 60s, or, if you prefer, the Louisiana Purchase. Or the Manhattan Project, maybe with a couple of Panama Canals thrown in.

All adjusted for inflation, of course.

How many universal health care programs, or alternative energy programs, or environmental repair programs, or poverty relief programs, would that kind of money pay for? I don't know, I'm asking.

Remember when the Bushies claimed that the outgoing Clinton staff took all the "W"s off the keyboards, and trashed the offices? That was a lie, by the way. 

Now look at what they're doing as they go out the door, on their way to be reunited with our money... now in the hands of their friends, along with those other profits from the wars, "defense," "homeland security," oil, and all of the many scams and boondoggles.

[Pulls out pockets — moths fly out.]


UPDATE: MORE NUMBERS

How's this for a stat? "New government figures show that almost 700,000 children went hungry in the United States at some point in 2007, up more than 50 percent from the year before to mark the highest point since 1998. And that's even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday. The department's annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998." And that's here, not Mali.

And here's a numbers quote from a random page-- literally; it's the page (92) I was on when I sat down to dinner after formatting Woid's post-- from Barbara Ehrenreich's newest book, This Land Is Your Their Land:

... [T]he rich get rich and the poor get poorer. To quote the Associated Press: The top 10 percent of households saw their net worth rise by 6.1 percent to an average of $3.11 million while the bottom 25 percent suffered a decline from a net worth in which their assets equaled their liabilities in 2001 to owing $1,400 more than their total assets in 2004." ... Paul Krugman reported on a study showing that those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution have been seeing income gains of only about 1 percent a year, or a total of 34% between 1972 and 2001. In that same period, those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution saw a gain of 87 percent, and those in the top .01 percent registered a gain of 497 percent. That's right: four hundred and ninety-seven percent.

UPDATE: ONE MORE SET OF NUMBERS

Although Senate Republicans endorsed bribery by declining to toss Ted Stevens out of their sorry ass caucus today, that was quickly followed by some less wonderful news: more countin'.

Mark Begich- 146,286
Ted Stevens- 143,912

This widens Begich's lead to 2374.

Happy Birthday convicted felon Ted Stevens! AP coulda picked a sweeter day to call the election for Mark Begich, Alaska's new U.S. Senator, and announce that Ted Stevens has, quite literally gone down the tubes... to Nowhere.