More on the Stimulus Package

Yesterday I wrote four random thoughts I had about the stimulus package. I forgot to include the fifth random thought, the one that spurred me to write about the package in the first place.

5. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell missed his calling: he should have been a mathematician. He's quoted in the Newsweek issue a couple of weeks ago as saying, "If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and you spent a million dollars every day since then you still would not have spent a trillion dollars."

I read that and thought, Wow, a trillion dollars is a lot of money, a dollar figure I can't really get my head around, and that really puts it in perspective. Then, because I don't take anything on faith, I grabbed a calculator to see if he knew what he was talking about.

Assuming Jesus was born on December 25 of the year 4 B.C.E. (Historians have argued that's the latest Jesus could have been born if the Bible is true), it's been 2011 years (the time from 12/25/4 B.C.E. to 12/25/2008 C.E.) plus 57 days to get us to February 20, 2009. If you do the math, then, that would be 2011 X 365.25 = 734,517.75 days in 2011 years, plus the 57 days to make a grand total of 734,574.75 days since Jesus's birth.

Now, if we multiply 734,574.75 days times a million dollars you get $734,574,750,000, which is $53 billion LESS than the stimulus package just passed.

It's an amazingly large number, and the more I think about the example the less it's helping me, but I can't stop thinking about it, nor about the fact that we passed a stimulus bill of roughly the same size at the end of 2008. And I'll tell you what is even more amazing: After passing stimulus bills like this, smaller packages that are only in double digit billions of dollars seem tiny. But a billion dollars is a thousand million, so a 75 billion dollar mortgage bailout plan will cost 75 thousand million dollars.

It's mind boggling, I tell ya!

One final statistic: I mentioned above that if we spent a million dollars a day since Jesus' birth we would still be $53 billion under the estimated cost of the just-signed stimulus package. If we kept spending a million dollars a day, we would finally erase the $53 billion difference...

...on March 30 of the year 2154.