Saturday, September 27, 2008
Can I bail out of this bail out? (Math intensive post)
| I have spent this past summer closely watching the Three Ring Circus we call Washington. Ring #1 is the Executive Branch, with the funny clowns. Ring #2 is the Legislative Branch with the poo throwing monkeys. Ring #3 is the Judicial branch with the big dumb slow moving elephants. But now the show is about over for this season and everyone is leaving the circus only to realize that the popcorn was really not that good, you come out smelling like dirty animals, and it was way too expensive for what little you got. I watched the debates. Well a couple of minutes, until I got the urge to kick in the front of my TV. Our elected officially are completely and utterly unable to fix the problems of the common man. In their impotence, it seems that every time they try to "fix" something they make it worse. Am I the only one who wasn't surprised when, once the government started handing out the free money this past year, gas prices went through the ceiling? If you KNOW your customers are getting free money, why not try raise prices to get your hands on it? And now we have this "bailout" thing. I freely admit I am not very savvy on the whole accounting financing economy stuff. I am good with numbers, though. Sadly, most Americans are not, and that's why they get screwed repeatedly. (Heck, lotteries are simply a tax on people who do not understand probability and statistics.) Just yesterday, AOL had a link to this blog post on what the economy would cost. This was one of the few economic articles I could understand. However, there's problems, big problems. The numbers are wrong. This guy handles other people's money for a living and can't do simple math? AOL felt this guy's blog post was so good they put it front page? Or maybe they have a vested interested in the average American not kowing the truth? The author never cites a source, but does give his credentials at the bottom of the article. If you do business with this guy or his company, you'd be wise to change companies. Otherwise you may find a decimal point moved in one of your statements one day. It's that bad. The big problem people have with understanding this stuff is the numbers are too astronomically big to grasp. Million, Billion, and Trillion all have the same number of letters, so on paper they "seem" to be about the same size. They also use words like "$700 Billion" instead of writing out the whole number $700,000,000,000. It's a classic strategy. If the truth hurts, change the terminology. Well Excel doesn't understand "$700 Billion" so I will use real numbers. The first group of calculations is correct: $700,000,000,000 for the bailout, divided by 305,000,000 Americans gives $2,295.08 per American to pay for the bailout. That's every man, woman, child, retiree. But lets take that number further. This comes out to 114.75 DAYS (assuming the National average salary of $40,000, or about $20 an hour). This is 2.9 weeks and 0.7 months, assuming a 5 day work week. May not seem too bad, until you try to put Grampa and Grandma back in the factories and get Baby Sue to go work at the local dairy. That's the cost divided among ALL Americans. Which of course raises the question: will our illegal immigrant friends be assisting in this bail out? I doubt it. OK, lets get more realistic with the numbers. The second set of numbers in the article starts out right: $700,000,000,00 for the bailout, divided by 151,000,000 working Americans (again using his numbers, since he gives no source) gives $4,635.76 for each working American. That's when he apparently stopped being able to do simple arithmetic, or he simply wants to lie and make things not look so bad. If, as he says, it takes each working American 13 days to pay off their share, that would mean that the Average working American makes $356.6 a day, and $44.75 an hour. ($4,635.76/13 = $356.6, and $365.6/8 = $44.75) I assumed 8 hour days. Maybe he assumed we'd work 24 hours a day to pay off the bailout? In reality (where everyone outside Washington lives) if we assume the $20 an hour average (which is realistic) then it will take the (assumed) 151,000,000 workers 231.79 hours to pay off the bailout. That's 29 work days (8 hours). That's 5.8 work weeks (5 days). That's 1.3 months (4 1/3 weeks/month). How you like that bailout now? Lets make this more fun. Most people know what "Tax Freedom Day" is. That's the fictional day of the year when we get to bring home ALL of our paycheck. This year it was April 23 (113 days). This was earlier than in the past due to the government payoff we got earlier this year. The problem with the "Tax Freedom" day is they assume you work 7 days a week til you pay off your taxes. I'm sorry. If I won't work 7 days a week for myself, you can bet I wont work 7 days a week to pay the government. So if we add these 113 days in with the 29 days to pay for the bailout, we get a whopping 142 WORKING days, or 28.4 work weeks. 28.4 work weeks? There's only 52 weeks in a year. Yup, this bailout has officially pushed us over the edge and we'll now be spending over half of our year paying for the government. Can you tell I'm a bit upset? What is my solution? Well over the next week or two I'll be giving my solutions. They may not be great solutions, but they've GOT to be better than the crazy schemes coming out of the Three Ring Washington Circus. After watching the debates, briefly, and all of the annoying commercials and political ads, one thing is for sure. Democrats blame Republicans, and vice-versa. Cong res blames the President, and vice verse. I firmly believe they're both right (for perhaps the first time ever). Democrats AND Republicans are to blame. Congress AND the President are to blame. So on that note I propose a new Political Party: The TOE Party. The Toss Out Everyone party. Our Platform is simple: If you have ever been to Washington, you are, by definition, a worthless self-serving idiot. We will vote for "the other guy." When your ballot shows the cute letter "I" beside a candidate, that used to mean "incumbent" but it now means "idiot" and we will vote the other way. Sure it may take 10 years to completely cleanse Washington of the worthless trash, but how many years have they had to fix SOMETHING and been unable to fix ANYTHING? It's time to get out the big TOE and boot them all out. Every single one of them. And keep booting them out til they actually do something right. For once. |
