Whoa! How many zeros did you say?

By Joseph Walther

Terrorism isn’t the worst danger we face in this country. It isn’t even close, either. And, while the war in Iraq is a serious problem for us, it isn’t the most urgent. Let me explain.

As a nation, we waste money in quantities that most people can’t imagine. We’ve become so desensitized in terms of government spending that the terms "billion" and "trillion" no longer mean anything.

The numbers are so massive that average citizens, having no real concept of just how big they are, simply shrug at the thought of such expenditures. They may even chuckle a bit whenever people issue those “Golden Fleece” awards over stupid spending.

The late Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (he died in 1969 at the age of 73) used to crack his famous joke about the way the United States Congress deals with spending issues.

"You know,” he'd joke, "a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon we're into some serious money."

I remember Johnny Carson’s audience cracking up big time over it. And, that was back in the day when everyone considered a MILLION dollars a lot of money.

So, just how LARGE is a BILLION dollars? Let’s do a little pretending to see if we can get it into perspective. We’ll all pretend that we have a BILLION dollars.

Let's ignore compound interest, too. We’ll simply assume that our $1-billion ($1,000,000,000—yep, that’s 9-zeros) is in cash, and that we have a storage closet that will hold it all in denominations of $5s, $10s, $20s, $50s.

In other words, when we want to buy something, we just open the damn closet and pull out a fist-full of $20s—or whatever—and go buy it.

A billion is equal to a thousand million—1,000 times 1,000,000. So if we have $1-billion, we could spend $1-million a year for one-thousand years. But, the bad news is that we’re not going to live for 1-thousand-years, so we’d better spend it faster.

But, even if we spend $2-million a year for 500-years, or $4-million a year for 250-years, or even $8-million a year for 125-years, we’re probably going to run out of life’s breath before our money runs out.

So, let’s speed it up a bit. If we conserve our finances effectively, we could spend about $12-million a year over an 80-year lifespan without running out of money.

We’d have to make some sacrifices—who doesn’t these days?—but I think we could all still live a pleasant life, all things considered.

Now, let’s add some perspective. We've spent over $466 billion on the Iraq war since "mission accomplished," which breaks down to around $8-billion per month.

But, even though I think our government has squandered this through the inept execution of the war, let's all forgive and forget. We’ll simply chalk it all up to what the private sector calls a sunk cost—lost due to monumental ineptness.

Of course, the private sector also fires its CEOs and Executive Managers for these kinds of screw-ups, but we won’t talk about this here.

Just remember; we have to be careful with this forgiving stuff. If we become too forgiving, our politicians may get the idea that we’re a bunch of damned, wishy-washy, pushover fools.

With this in mind, I want us all to consider that over the same Iraqi war reference period, you know… since “mission accomplished,” we've spent over $85-billion on PORK projects.

Breaking this all down into annual and monthly terms, we’ve PORKED ourselves to the tune of around $17-billion a year, or around $1.5-billion a month.

Understand that I’m not knocking this. While there are a couple of different definitions for PORK spending, here’s the most common one used by those with 3-digit IQs.

PORK is what OTHER U. S. Representatives and Senators spend on THEIR constituent states and representative districts.

Whatever our OWN Congresspersons and Senators spend on OUR state is never considered PORK, and is always a matter of vital security interest to the entire country.

Even so, 99% of PORK is waste no matter how we define it. It's used for nothing more than gaining election year "attaboy" points for each state's respective Representatives and Senators.

Now, let's redo the arithmetic. We have $17 billion dollars. Not only this year, but EVERY year. Over an 80-year life span, it comes to $1.36-TRILLION. Spelled out, that's $1,360,000,000,000.

Just think... If you had just $1-trillion (that's one-thousand billion), you could spend $1-billion a year for 1,000 years, or $2-billion a year for 500 years, or $4-billion a year for 250 years... You finish the arithmetic!

We spend all of this money on all of this PORK… not just during one year, but every year. Yet, we face a national debt of over $9-trillion. It will be even higher when the next President takes office.

It’s one thing to be in hock to the tune of $9-trillion and have the best of everything: infrastructure, energy independence, affordable health care for EVERYONE, etc. But we don’t. We’re light-years from it.

How many of our critical social issues could we resolve if we'd stop letting our elected representatives waste money at the clip they're presently doing it?

Think about it! We're going to have to do something about business as usual on the beltway. If we don't do it soon, it won't be terrorists who do this country in! Ya think?

Say… you don’t think these politicians think we’re a bunch of damned, wishy-washy, pushover fools, do you?

I’ll be back next week with some more dirt. I have not even come close to hammering the lobbyists on K-Street, but stand by.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.