07 January, 2009

$1,200,000,000,000.00

That’s $1.2 trillion. The expected size of the deficit for 2009.

The mind boggles. I can’t even comprehend that many zeros.

What could you as an individual do with $1,200,000,000,000.00?

You could buy 600,000,000,000 gallons of gas at $2 per gallon. That’s too big to deal with too.

You could buy 240,000,000,000 McMeals at $5 each.

You could buy 30,000,000 cars at $40,000 each.

You could buy 6,000,000 houses at $200,000 each.

The most expensive car in the world is the Bugatti Veyron at $1,192,057. You could buy 1,006,663 of them.

You could buy 400,000 30-second Super Bowl XLIII spots at $3,000,000 each. Of course, that’s nearly 139 days worth of continuous ads, and the Super Bowl only lasts about 4 hours.

The purchase price for Alaska was $7,200,000 in 1867. You could have bought 166,667 Alaskas.

The purchase price for the Louisiana Territory was $15,000,000 in 1803. You could have bought 80,000 Louisianas.

The Hope Diamond has an estimated value of $300,000,000-$350,000,000. I’ll use $300,000,000 to simplify the math. At that price you could buy 4,000 Hope Diamonds.

The most valuable sports franchise in the United States is the Dallas Cowboys, worth an estimated $1,612,000,000. You could buy the Dallas Cowboys 744 times.

The B-2 bomber cost $2,100,000,000. The United States built 21 of them. You could build 571.

The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier cost around $5,100,000,000. You could buy 235 of them.

If you won $1.2 trillion in the lottery and paid 40% taxes on it and had the payments spread out over 25 years, you’d get $28,800,000,000 every year.

Bill Gates net worth is in the $57,000,000,000 range. You’d be over 21 times richer than Bill Gates. Hey, that’s an idea. Seize all the assets of the Forbes 400. That’d pay off that deficit and then some. I’m kidding, of course.

05 January, 2009

Should Republicans Be Thinking about 2016?

While I think that 2010 has potential to be a very good year for Republicans, at least in the House, the White House seems likely to be out of reach until 2016. At this point, a 2-term Presidency for Mr. Barack Obama (D-USA) seems a near certainty.

How can I say that before he’s even taken his first oath of office?

It’s true that I don’t know what the future holds. His administration may be rife with scandal. He may be a foreign policy disaster. He may generate enough angst from the right that they’re able to rise up and defeat him. All of those things are possible.

Here’s what’s probable though.

What’s the #1 question in voter’s minds when they go to the polls to re-elect an incumbent or vote in a new President?

“Am I better or worse off now than I was 4 years ago?”

It’s hard to see how most people will answer that as “worse”. I certainly hope that most people won’t. That would mean that we really are in a “depression” and not a “recession”. Because otherwise, because of or in spite of Mr. Obama, the economy should have recovered to some degree by then.

I already said that this blog is not going to be a cheerleader for every little negative thing that will hit the Obama administration. I’m certainly not going to root for the kind of economic downturn that would benefit a Republican Presidential candidate in 2012.