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Four out of five polled Americans don't know how much a trillion is. Three out of five miss by a factor of 1,000 or more. That's like guessing that Babe Ruth hit 60,000 home runs in one season, or that a gallon of milk costs $4,000, or a Mercedes costs $50, or your wife had 3,000 lovers before you met her, or the population of Norway is 5,000. More than half the voting public is at least that far off.
So how does democracy work when the huge majority of the voters have such wild misconceptions of what kinds of money their elected officials are spending, or how much war or bailouts cost? The news media is telling them, but they don't understand, not even close, the meaning of the words the news anchor speaks.
Its as if you have 1,000,000 millionaires.... the deficit will be raised to 14 Trillion which is equivalent to 14,000,000 millionaires.... the unfunded liabilities is about 65 Trillion which is about 65,000,000 millionaires.... so to pay for 65 trillion you will have to take a million dollars from 65,000,000 millionaires which is about 1/5 the population of the US... umm... problem... 1/5 of the population of the US are not millionaires... hehehehe...
Four out of five polled Americans don't know how much a trillion is. Three out of five miss by a factor of 1,000 or more. That's like guessing that Babe Ruth hit 60,000 home runs in one season, or that a gallon of milk costs $4,000, or a Mercedes costs $50, or your wife had 3,000 lovers before you met her, or the population of Norway is 5,000. More than half the voting public is at least that far off.
So how does democracy work when the huge majority of the voters have such wild misconceptions of what kinds of money their elected officials are spending, or how much war or bailouts cost? The news media is telling them, but they don't understand, not even close, the meaning of the words the news anchor speaks.
lI prefer to look at it another, which the news media very carefully avoids doing.
There are 125-million households in the USA. How many "125,000,000s" are there in a trillion? Ans: Eight thousand, which is how many dollar per household it will take to pay off each trillion in debt.
For example, a trillion dollar war will need to be paid for at a rate of $8,000 per family. The annual $2.5-trillion cost of health care will cost each family $20,000 per year (and rising. That includes huge profits to the insurance industry and bloated accounting and billing costs). Do you remember your favorite news anchor carefully pointing out to you last year that "The cost of health care in the US last year was $5711 per person", with a graphic chart to hit it home? No, that press release was never rewritten as a story in the 6 oclock news.
Can you send in a check, or would you like to pay that in installments? You can't just say "Duhh, I didn't know a trillion was that much."
If you could actually count to 1 trillion saying each number every second. It would take you 31,688 years. Now count to the national deficit.
It's a good thing a dollar is not worth anything anymore, or a trillion would be a lot of money.
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