Yesterday one of my friends forwarded me an e-mail that I found very interesting, although I was (as usual) very skeptical of its content. It dealt with making the really huge numbers of the federal budget understandable, and I quote it here:
START QUOTE
The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the politicians spending YOUR tax money. A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases:
A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.
While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at New Orleans It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division:
Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number, what does it mean?
A. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.
B. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
C. Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.
END QUOTE
As you can probably tell, this message was written by someone who is pretty seriously down on politicians...especially Democratic ones, as evidenced by the shot across Mary Landrieu's bow. But here's the question: is this true and accurate?
I consulted one of my favorite websites, Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Page. Snopes dates this e-mail to 2003, when they first collected it, and notes that the math, as far as it goes in its interpretation of billion, is relatively accurate. Of course, the original calculations being from 2003, things are now (five years later) a bit off, but that's to be expected...what I found interesting was that the figures were accurate at all. I thought this was just a typical mindless political screed. Even the part about the $250 billion for New Orleans was mathematically fairly accurate, even if the charge levied against Landrieu wasn't...she didn't ask for the whole $250B for New Orleans, but related it to the population of New Orleans to demonstrate the size of the amount being requested for the post-Katrina reconstruction of the Gulf Coast.
So, what's the point here? First, that while many of the e-mail screeds that clog your inbox are stupid and wrong, some can have a kernel of truth and provide good food for thought. Second, that you should always check out things like this for yourself before believing them. Never let anyone do your thinking for you. Snopes.com is a great reference for these sorts of things.
But let's not let the politicians completely off the hook...after all, it was Senator Everett Dirksen who once famously said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."
And, oh, by the way, that money is yours, courtesy of the taxes you pay.
So you might want to watch how your government is spending it.
Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.
Bilbo
6 comments:
I got that email forward a few weeks back. Still it's amazing that in a work day...a billion dollars is spent...I wish it was spent on me
Big numbers are both amazing and scary... I've recently finished a sci fi short story collection where many of the distances were given in units like light minutes and light weeks - I know obviously that a light year is further than either of those, but it somehow has never registed until I was seeing these units explained in terms of actual distance (or rather the time taken to cover the distance with a non faster than light drive).
Is a billion a thousand million or a million million in the US? Someone told me some time ago that a billion used to be considered a million million in America. I've always been taught it as a thousand million.
Those numbers tell me a lot. I was born in 1959!
Wow. I love finding out new facts although I forget them pretty quickly. These days my short term memory is practically non existent.
Putting Billions into contexts like that was very interesting. Its really is eye opening.
I always enjoy looking at things from different angles. Especially comparing costs of living in one country in terms of what the dollar amounts can buy in a different country.
Zero_zero_one: in the U.S., a "billion" is generally thought of as a thousand million, I think. I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and even then I wasn't sure.
Amanda: comparing perceptions of costs of living in various countries can be fascinating. Many years ago when I was living in Berlin, a young Polish fellow spent a few nights as a guest at my apartment. He was fascinated by my stereo set and asked an interesting question: he didn't want to know how much it cost, he wanted to know how long I'd had to work to get enough money to pay for it. I thought that was a question that said a lot about how Eastern Europeans in societies that were still Communist looked at the world.
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