The Reset Button

When I was a kid I counted to a thousand once. I think it took me ten minutes or so. I can sort of imagine how much a million dollars is. But I once heard that it for a billion seconds to tick by it would take 32 years. Thirty-two years. I realize I only teach history but lately I’ve been trying my hand at some economics. So, I pulled some numbers off the Internet just to see how big those numbers really are keeping in mind the federal bailout package is near that amount give or take a few hundred million dollars:

“The treasury could give every man, woman and child in the country $3,272.57. For football fans, one trillion dollars would pay every pro player’s salary for the next 313 years. A stack of 100 dollar bills worth one trillion dollars would rise to 789 miles. The deficit is at a record high of $1.2 trillion. The national debt is at $10.6 trillion. That stack of 100 dollar bills would reach upward to 8,000 miles high.”
-Random Internet guy

With that in mind, would if we just started over? Honestly think about it for a second. What if everyone kept everything they had but they owed NOTHING. Clean slate. Everyone starting from scratch. No threat of foreclosures or credit card. Everything back to zero. Hit the reset button.

Our financial system is in such dire straits it seems to me the only solution is to hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE. Whenever I have too many programs running on my notebook and it locks up, I restart the thing. Sure that could fry the computer, but I give that a 1% chance of happening. And granted when you’re playing with the national economy, a 1% chance of screwing up is a big deal. But think about this: The federal government gave the insurance giant $85 billion dollars in loans to keep the “entire system” from collapsing. Whatever that means. Remember that is 2,720 years worth of seconds. One dollar going all the way back to Aristotle’s day in Ancient Greece. What happened to all of that cash from the federal bailout late last year? They blew it. Now AIG is now asking Congress to approve additional loans in the amount of $65 billion where some analysts are thinking the total amount could reach $180 billion. So in seconds terms that’s one dollar for every second going back to before the Bronze Age ended in 1200 BCE.

Oh and wait. This is your money. Yours and my tax dollars are going to plug a sinking cruise ship headed for a huge iceberg that may or may not be there. “We just can’t let it collapse,” say the experts “it’s just tied to too much of the global infrastructure.” Remember playing the original Nintendo game system and all of the sudden it started to glitch? The picture was moving all kids of ways and you couldn’t even make out what level you were on? Every kid knew to take out the game cartridge and blow on it. It didn’t make sense to keep playing until MAYBE, just MAYBE the game corrected itself.

All we hear is terrible, terrible news about the economy these days. Job loss numbers. The DOW sinks another 4%. Here’s something you might not know. The Dow Jones Industrial is an average of 30 of the biggest stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. There are over 10,000 publicly traded companies on the NYSE. That single number, whether it be 14,372 or 6,427 is what causes so much angst and confusion about what to do next.

So maybe resetting everything back to zero is a little drastic. But so is ushering billions of dollars of our money out the door with relatively little oversight. Everyday is a new number. If we ran our checkbooks and bank accounts like Congress did, we would default on our mortgages before the movers could get the first plasma television through the front door.

Here’s the last sobering figure for this post:

Let’s say we have a plan to pay off our national debt of around $11 trillion dollars by paying $1 every second. And since I’m feeling optimistic, let’s imagine that the U.S. government actually manages a balanced budget for the next, oh, 20 centuries. How many years would it be before our national debt was paid off?

It would be the year 348,568 CE.

Okay, so that amount of time is beyond comprehension. Let’s imagine the government has a little more weekend money and can afford to pay off the national debt at a rate of $1 million a second. How long would that take?

We’d be debt free by Tuesday.