How Is Much Is A Billion Dollars? Or Better Yet, How Much Is $4.1 Billion, The Amount Of Our Daily Deficit Growth?

The political class tends to throw around billion and TRILLION dollar numbers as if these numbers are loose change in their pockets. I read a report today, that is consistent with other Federal budget figures I have seen, that says the Federal budget deficit grows by $4.1 billion everyday, 365 days a year. Let's take a look at what a billion dollars really is as well as what $4.1 billion really is:

• If you had spent a $1,000 a day since the day Jesus Christ was born, you would still not have spent a billion dollars. In fact, you would have spent less than $800 million. Most Americans could live very comfortably on a thousand dollars a day. So imagine you were at that manager when he was born and immediately started spending a thousand dollars a day. That would have covered a lot of history and a lot of time and you would still be short of a billion.
• If you spent a thousand dollars a day since 9,000 BC, you would have spent about $4.1 billion, the amount of money that the Federal government overruns its budget in one day. Around 9,000 BC, the world was in the Mesolithic Period and the human race was just figuring out how to farm.
• If you were trying to gather a billion dollars, every man, woman, and child in the country would have to give you $3.26. Imagine collecting that payment.
• At $4.1 billion a day, every United States household, on average, will eventually have to kick in about $36 a day just to cover the deficit, never mind paying the addition taxes required for government services.
• This daily rate translates into about $250 per week per household or about $13,000 per year per household. It is mind boggling. This $250 a week and $13,000 a year is wealth taken out of the economy to service our national debt that cannot be used to grow the economy, create jobs, and improve the living standard of every American.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 3.5 million teachers in the country at the K-12 levels. Based on several industry sources, a rough estimate of an average teacher's salary and benefits in the country is about $56,000. Thus, one day of the Federal deficit, $4.1 billion, would provide sufficient funding for hiring an additional 73,000 teachers for one year. Ponder that: one day of deficit can fund one year's worth of 73,000 teachers. Only 47 days of deficits could double the amount of teachers available in the country. Think that might help improve the education output from our schools if we doubled the number of teachers?
• According to several sources in the employment field, I estimated that the average salary and benefits of a Border Patrol agent is about $77,000 a year. Thus, the $4.1 billion deficit from one day could annually fund the addition of more than 53,000 additional Border Patrol personnel on the US/Mexican border. Three days worth of deficit spending could fund three shifts of additional agents, each shift being comprised of more than 53,000 agents. Since the border is 1969 miles long, we could place one Border Patrol person every 200 feet along the border, 24 hours a day. I think that such a deployment would have an outstanding chance of significantly reducing the drug flow into this country from Mexico.

We could go on and on of the better ways of spending $1 billion dollars or the $4.1 billion a day that we are growing the Federal budget deficit. The point is that the political class is wasting an unfathomable amount of our wealth every day, wealth that would be better spent expanding the economy, improving the education process, or better protecting our borders. Given that the political class has taken no steps of consequence to remedy this deficit situation, it becomes imperative to move them out in the November elections and get people into office that will defuse this ticking financial time bomb immediately. We cannot wait for Obama's budget commission to come back with suggestions on taming the deficit. We need to start immediately with such relatively simple steps as freezing all Federal salaries (a move that the House Of Representatives' Democrats voted down last week), freezing all Federal hiring, start withdrawing our troops from useless deployments around the world, eliminating all Congressional earmarks, and the seven or so other changes we proposed in a previous post.

As always, several steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" such as an annual budget reduction reduction plan, Federal government bureaucracy overhaul, earmark elimination, etc. would help to start saving billions of dollars at once. Thus, how much is a billion dollars? Answer: a heck of a lot and we do not have them to pay for our outsized government spending.



Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.