Fun With Numbers

Our president, I've been given to understand, isn't crazy about reading.

Unfortunately, many Americans share his lack of passion for the written word. And many of those who do read ... well, let's just say I have a theory, the USA is possibly the only country in the world where as the population reads, the national IQ level plummets.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh.

But then again, maybe not. Having been a bookseller for the past eight years, working in practically the only bookstore in town, a town with a population of almost 300,000, I feel I have my finger on the pulse of the reading public in my fair city. I'm priveleged to witness just what goes into the minds of the average red state American. Romance novels mostly, followed by a pretty substantial amount of mysteries, sci-fi and children's books.

Nationwide in our stores the current number 1 fiction best seller is Janet Evanovitch's latest and the number 1 non-fiction slot belongs to Ann Coulter. That tells me that reading habits here are probably not that far out of line with what most Americans are reading.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American." Or something like that.

I ran across a great book today, a children's book called "How Much is a Million" by David M. Schwartz.

I think every American ought to read it. It only takes a few minutes but I found it very helpful in understanding just how big the numbers are that we're dealing with in our economy today.

Too often, numbers are just numbers .. we hear about millions and billions and even trillions of dollars being spent but the numbers are too abstract. Most of us don't have a frame of reference for understanding just how big these numbers are.

How much bigger than a million is a billion? And how much bigger than a billion is a trillon?

This is what I learned in Schwartz's book.

If one were to count to a million it would take about 23 days. That's a lot of counting. A million is a very big number.

But get this, to count to a billion it would take 95 years. That's a substantially larger number so when we hear that we're spending 450,000,000,000 for this year's war budget that means if one were to count this number off it would take 42,750 years. That's a shitload of dough.

I read the other day that our current debt level, taking everything into consideration .. personal debt, state, local, federal and unfunded liabilities, Social Security and Medicare, for example .. the overall debt level is almost 90,000,000,000,000 bucks. That 90 TRILLION, folks.

Well, you ask, how long would it take to count to a trillion?

Mr. Schwartz tells us it would take almost 200,000 YEARS to count to a trillion. Do the math, that means that if one were to count to 90 trillion it would take 18,000,000 YEARS.

Now maybe you'll understand why I don't get too excited when I hear the media and the economists tell us how great our economy is.

Mr. Bush needs to read Mr. Schwartz's book.

But then again, why bother. Only one number means anything to presidents and that's the number 4 or possibly 8, the length of time they get to spend in office running up these Titanic sized debts.