How much is $700,000,000,000?
September 29, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , trackback
Yup, lots of zeros. Research shows that the human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $700 billion. Since we usually don’t deal with numbers that large in our daily lives, a million, a billion or a trillion is just an indistinguishably big number to us.
As the wall street bailout of $700 billion is coming to all our neighborhood soon, I start to think about what this means for us.
According to New York Times, $100 billion is sufficient to provide universal health care to all people in the U.S. without it.
$6 billion is our annual cancer research. With the bailout money there is a good chance we can significantly expedite the cure for cancers.
Last Friday we learned the bad news on the greenhouse gas emissions. “Carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007″, exceeding the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.
Worse - “Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up carbon dioxide, are doing so at lower rates, scientists said. If those trends continue, the world will be on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.”
In 2007, the U.S. spent a putrid $28 million on basic solar research. Imagine if we can spend 25,000 times of that on alternative energy research and development.
$700 billion can also put solar roof systems on 1/3 of the households in the U.S. Imagine 1/3 of the homes stop contributing to the unforgivable practice of mountaintop removal.
And no one can tell me what exactly the $700 billion will do.
I am an optimistic and hopeful person in general. But today I have a nagging feeling that we are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, because so many of us on the Titanic refuses to believe that the ship is going down. You have to excuse my dark mood today. Recent events have piled on all of us.
Tomorrow, hopefully, will be a better day.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Comments»
Cindy, this bailout has got to be disheartening to both presidential candidates. How can they plan to do anything in a new administration when we are so hog-tied by debt? I think we’ll be seeing the repercussions of this for a long, long time.
I do not support the bailout for a number of reasons:
1)If we are a true free market, then the market should be allowed to resolve the crisis it created.
2)Bailing out Wall Street would also create moral hazard: the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions (defined in econ books)
3)Why $700 billion? According to Forbes.com, “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
4)Even with $700 billion, there is absolutely no assurance that it will work. We are still likely to slip into a recession.
Much to my dismay, I predict that the bailout will be passed in the next week or so.
Well, you might as well add $1 trillion - cost of Iraqi war - to your tally. Worse yet, this cost is still ticking up $1 million everyday
Joyce: sigh.
Danny: thanks for all the points. I understand where you are coming from. It is so unfair, it is so un-free-market. I am afraid we may have to foot the bill just to reduce the possibility of a total melt down.
Susan: sigh.
Well, I just have to add how important this election is. Vote please.
It is really disheartening to see where our government’s priorities are. Mostly in the wrong place.
Check out http://3trillion.org/ if you haven’t yet. It was a good way for my kids to understand what 3 trillion dollars might really look like.
On the one hand I hate the idea of the bailout. On the other I’m afraid of what may happen if the government doesn’t step in. I am feeling like a financial doofus because I just can’t wrap my mind around the whole thing:(