Heh. Funny, I had that same "we can kill the deficit in one move" thought. Let the fucking leeches finally work for a living for once. (This language is predicated on that number not including military retirement. Most military people actually earned a retirement. Former DEA assholes can piss up a rope, and then hang themselves with it.)
Visualizing $100 bills in various amounts up to one trillion dollars is a fairly common YouTube animation (here’s a representative example https://youtu.be/n4-4bvuX7qA). Together, these videos may have been watched as many as 10,000,000 times—but it’s unlikely the individuals watching them are “your typical rube[s].”
So innumeracy reigns. It’s not a partisan problem, but just another aspect of rational ignorance that insures democracy will always be illusory, dangerously unstable, or both.
I once visualized things in terms of beers. How many beers could I earn in an hour of work? How many beers was dinner or a movie? Dollars or other currency are just pieces of paper or numbers on a statement while the real issue what did it take to obtain that piece of paper - risk, effort, etc. I can agree that few can image the magnitude of a trillion dollars. Maybe instead of border walls we look at cities and how many workers in a city it takes to get to a trillion dollars at the average salary. Then we could use 34 Richmonds or Scrantons to define something. The math for that is too much work for the moment, but US cities have more meaning than border walls.
Heh. Funny, I had that same "we can kill the deficit in one move" thought. Let the fucking leeches finally work for a living for once. (This language is predicated on that number not including military retirement. Most military people actually earned a retirement. Former DEA assholes can piss up a rope, and then hang themselves with it.)
Visualizing $100 bills in various amounts up to one trillion dollars is a fairly common YouTube animation (here’s a representative example https://youtu.be/n4-4bvuX7qA). Together, these videos may have been watched as many as 10,000,000 times—but it’s unlikely the individuals watching them are “your typical rube[s].”
So innumeracy reigns. It’s not a partisan problem, but just another aspect of rational ignorance that insures democracy will always be illusory, dangerously unstable, or both.
I once visualized things in terms of beers. How many beers could I earn in an hour of work? How many beers was dinner or a movie? Dollars or other currency are just pieces of paper or numbers on a statement while the real issue what did it take to obtain that piece of paper - risk, effort, etc. I can agree that few can image the magnitude of a trillion dollars. Maybe instead of border walls we look at cities and how many workers in a city it takes to get to a trillion dollars at the average salary. Then we could use 34 Richmonds or Scrantons to define something. The math for that is too much work for the moment, but US cities have more meaning than border walls.