I was reading an article this morning on Common Dreams which indicated that funding for the war in Afghanistan comes in at $108 billion. Written out longhand, that would read $108,000,000,000.00.
The problem with big numbers like that is that it truly is beyond most people's imaginations. Poor and middle class Americans have difficulty imagining $1 million and, for some of us, $10,000 is a pipe dream. So, $108 billion becomes an abstract figure that doesn't really compute.
To try to put $108 billion in an easier to digest form, I have broken it down below, though at several levels, it is just as difficult to comprehend!
$108 billion for one year equates to:
The problem with big numbers like that is that it truly is beyond most people's imaginations. Poor and middle class Americans have difficulty imagining $1 million and, for some of us, $10,000 is a pipe dream. So, $108 billion becomes an abstract figure that doesn't really compute.
To try to put $108 billion in an easier to digest form, I have broken it down below, though at several levels, it is just as difficult to comprehend!
$108 billion for one year equates to:
- $9 billion ($9,000,000,000) per month;
- $2.07 billion ($2,076,923,076) per week;
- $295.9 million ($295,890,410) per day;
- $12.3 million ($12,300,000) per hour;
- $205,790 per minute;
- $3,424.66 per second.
Of these figures, the only one I truly can visualize is the LAST one. It represents slightly more than 2 months income into our household. However, in the time it has taken me to punch out this sentence, the expenditures on the war in Afghanistan have exceeded our yearly income!
I would guess that the amount our nation spends in Afghanistan EACH minute exceeds the amount of yearly household income that most of you reading this can claim. And Afghanistan is only one part of the picture!!
We will spend $50 billion this year in Iraq. The Libyan fiasco is costing around $100 million per week. Then there are the costs of all our far flung bases around the globe, veteran's benefits, health care costs for injured, sick and disabled soldiers, and the interest on the debt attributed to fighting all our wars that weren't paid for at the time.
If we could add all these huge numbers together and several more that get hidden each year in the federal budget, we would wind up with a figure that is astronomical in size. It is because this overall number is so huge that it tends to lose any substantive meaning for the average person.
That is precisely what the powers that be are counting on!
I would guess that the amount our nation spends in Afghanistan EACH minute exceeds the amount of yearly household income that most of you reading this can claim. And Afghanistan is only one part of the picture!!
We will spend $50 billion this year in Iraq. The Libyan fiasco is costing around $100 million per week. Then there are the costs of all our far flung bases around the globe, veteran's benefits, health care costs for injured, sick and disabled soldiers, and the interest on the debt attributed to fighting all our wars that weren't paid for at the time.
If we could add all these huge numbers together and several more that get hidden each year in the federal budget, we would wind up with a figure that is astronomical in size. It is because this overall number is so huge that it tends to lose any substantive meaning for the average person.
That is precisely what the powers that be are counting on!
I'd say NO ONE, even the rich, understands such numbers. They just know their monetary worth is in those big numbers, and that (like all of us) they want the number ever higher.
ReplyDeleteI bet you're right on that score!
ReplyDelete