America's deficit, it's recently been reported, is 11.3 trillion.
A staggering amount and as I started to write this, it just occurred to me that figures are becoming so immense in the modern day that "new" names for such amounts are being created - custom money, if y'like. Nothing has been seen before; amounts are becoming so vast that we no longer have established names for them. We must surely be approaching "gazillion". Or the hysterical, "brazillion" from the Bush joke, Three Brazillian soldiers have been killed, oh my God, how many's three brazillion!)
Setting the funnies aside, to try to add some perspective, 11.3 trillion is 11 thousand, three hundred separate piles of a billion dollars. Remember when a billion seemed to be a fantastic amount? (To add a little more perspective: 5 figures is a large amount to the majority - though admittedly less so than say three decades ago, which further supports the point. US deficit is...shit, hang on, I'll have to write this one down! Fourteen figures - in debt).
Money has become this monster after which we all crave; it is in fact our existence. Without it one can simply, not exist.
And now, in the midst of the recent financial instability, those with it are in large part, panicking - scrabbling to hold on to what they have.
The huge majority of individual homeowners who have lost said homes pale into a long-forgotten insignificance beside the recent collapse of massive mortgage houses whose disintegration has freaked out governments the world over - not less so the mighty US who've had to bale out several of them - at a cost of 700 billion.
(The government in fact are hoping it's an investment as traditionally the housing market has always bounced back so they are banking on -heh heh, pun IS intended - the market recovering and they making huge profits. Only time will tell. But keeping in mind this deficit, and the continuing amounts they are sinking into the Middle East, this move could be the definition of "sailing close to the wind".
Interesting times ahead.
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4 comments:
I thought of you today when I heard about Rusell Crowe's answer to this problem. He suggested giving every person in America a million dollars. However, the New Zealand-born actor failed to do the maths, severely underestimating the cost of his bailout plan.
The actual expense would be $300 trillion - a figure greater than the US's entire annual gross domestic product.
It's times like this when I love the fact that our friends across the ditch claim him as their own. Just keep him, he's an idiot.
Yep - he's a fuckin' nob end and no mistake!
And did ye see him playing with his hair on Leno like a gaylord?
Wanker!
I heard about it on the radio. Wish I'd seen it actually.
Google it. Try "wanker", "shite actor"...something like that should get ye there.
It even made it to Alan Jones's morning breakfast show on radio. "Maybe you should just keep quiet and stick to acting", the hugely popular broadcaster said.
Haha.
(Maybe you should just keep quiet full stop...).
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