The Math Behind A "Billion Dollars An Hour"
This is the new Senate Republican talking point: If you take the cost of the stimulus bill and add in the cost of the Fiscal Year 2009 omnibus bill, and then divide that number by the number of hours in the first 50 days of the Obama presidency, the result is $1 billion-per-hour of spending by Congress. Sounds big and scary. But it's also a great example of fuzzy math that does not really mean what it seems to mean.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is doing the arithmetic this way, per Politico's Mike Allen. "50 days times 24 hours equals 1,200 hours. 1,200 times 1 billion equals 1.2 trillion (a thousand billions is a trillion)."
It's true that if you add the stimulus and the omnibus you get about $1.2 trillion. But that money will not be spent in 50 days. The omnibus is a spending bill to run the government over the course of an entire year. (It should have passed last fall, but was delayed for the presidential election and because of partisan infighting.) The stimulus will be paid out over several years, with most of the money going out the door over the next 18 months. So no one is spending a billion dollars an hour. Consider this comparison: If over the course of a one hour board meeting, the head of Mattel decided to produce 1 million new Barbie dolls over the coming year, no one would say that Mattel is making 1 million Barbie dolls an hour. They would say Mattel is making 1 million Barbie dolls a year.
Furthermore, most of this money would have probably been spent even if Republicans controlled congress and John McCain had won the White House. The omnibus had some increases in spending over recent levels, including some departments that got 10 percent increases. But no Republican has proposed not funding the government. (McCain spoke of spending freezes on the trail, not dramatic reductions.) And Republicans would still have needed to find a way to pass the omnibus in the first weeks of the new year. Something similar can be said for the stimulus. Though few Republicans supported the stimulus bill Obama signed, most did not oppose the idea of an expensive stimulus to deal with the economic collapse. Republicans broadly supported a $152 billion stimulus last year, for example, and this year they proposed a tax-cut heavy alternative that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. (Notably, the Republicans left out a price for their plan when it was proposed.) Though the Republican stimulus might have been smaller, and would contain more tax cuts and less spending, it still would have been expensive. In this alternate universe, however, McConnnell and his comrades would not be complaining about the pace of McCain's per-hour spending rate, trying to scare the country with big numbers that don't mean all that much.
MORE: Speaking of McConnell, the good people at McClatchy report that he requested $75 million in earmarks in the omnibus bill that so upsets him for being too big.
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Real Math:
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The GOP handed out a minimum of 7,200,000,000,000 dollars before they left.
http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2008/11/24/the-real-bailout-cost-7-4-trillion.aspx
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How about this math, Micheal:
If you spread the cost, at no interest, of the Bernanke/GOP bailout throughout the entire Hadean, Archaen, Proterazoic, and Phanerazoic eons of the Earth's history the payments would amount to $131/Month.
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And it still would not be payed off! -
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"the result is $1 billion-per-hour of spending by Congress. Sounds big and scary."
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It sounds idiotic. It's as if they have completely given up on wanting to be taken seriously. Coming up with talking points for talk radio isn't going to help them politically either I'm guessing. -
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I wish that if people were going to play silly games with big numbers, that they'd take the additional step of dividing by 250,000,000 to get the figure 'per American'
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Not only would this knock the numbers down to a more easily imagined size, they would allow for more direct comparisons to typical American families other expenditures.
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Needless to say it's nice to see you knock down a talking point rather than simply repeating it. Next up, lets address the fact that the solution to excessive earmarks and targeted spending is higher State and Local taxes. -
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So in other words MS -- you can say it they lied!
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Of course, MS, let's not mention that the money you are trying to scare us about is only one-sixth the sum of money your party handed out with no oversight whatever.
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Now that's scary... -
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And just in case lie is too strong a term try:
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tricked
hoodwinked
bamboozled
led astray -
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Michael, should *all* your posts and dead-tree articles begin the way this one did? "This is the new Senate Republican talking point...."?
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sorry... "shouldn't," of course. Not "should."
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@53_3 -- Ropes are "payed"; money is "paid."
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That aside, anyone who doesn't use fingers and toes for counting has long known that all this silly arithmetic (if you line up a trillion one dollar bills end-to-end, they'll reach to the Andromeda galaxy -- if they don't get burned to a crisp as they pass Alpha Centauri) is just another way of giving the base some talking points to keep them warm when they can't afford to pay the heating bill.
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We're nearing the event horizon of a financial black hole, and all the Republicans can do is make up phony numbers about how fast the money is going out. MS is quite right about how legitimate their numbers are -- or, more precisely, aren't. And for those of you who think Dubya and his gang didn't dig this pit into which we are now sinking, remember the story of Joseph in Egypt. We threw trillions away during our seven fat years, and we borrowed trillions more, and now we have to put ourselves even deeper in hock to get through the lean ones.
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If only the politicians took our situation as seriously as the blogosphere does ... -
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Of course not all of the time Obama spent in office has been working on theses particular bills. If we only count the time that was sepnt on the roll-calls plus the signing, you'd get an even higher 'per-hour' figure. And it would be exactly as meaningless.
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incandenzah, I will take your recommendation under advisement, as clearly this post provides further evidence that my journalistic career consists of little more than parroting what Republicans tell me to say.
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Michael Scherer:
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Though the Republican stimulus might have been smaller, and would contain more tax cuts and less spending, it still would have been expensive. In this alternate universe, however, McConnnell and his comrades would not be complaining about the pace of McCain's per-hour spending rate, trying to scare the country with big numbers that don't mean all that much.
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I'm afraid you have that last part wrong.
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They're not "trying to scare the country with big numbers", they're trying to scare people like Howard Fineman into a lack of confidence in Obama's "FDR-ness", so as to communicate that image through to the larger public, which they are obviously happy to do.
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They're trying to win Politico's ledes on a daily basis. They're trying to make fear, uncertainty and doubt the topic of conversation amongst political and media elites.
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They're trying to scare people like you, Michael Scherer --they could give a f*ck about us. -
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bobell:
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Some have criticized me for showing off, but really, it just one way of trying to pointing out the absolute enormity of the amount of money the GOP already spent - and recklessly at that.
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I've never seen anyone put it in terms of a note whose term is so long it spans the entire planet's history - and still produces a sizeable bill at 0% interest. In actuality, I wonder if such a sum can really ever be paid off.
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And what's worse is that China holds the note. -
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Here is the problem that the Republicans aren't getting and don't seem like they will be getting anytime soon. People are scared, they have lost jobs or are on the brink of losing one. They have lost their health insurance. They are facing foreclosure. You can't scare people today with big numbers. The Republicans keep talking about bankrupting our children's and grandchildren's future not understanding that people are struggling to feed their children and grandchildren TODAY. They can keep playing these games with how much money has been spent or will be spent or has been authorized but all it does is make them look even more and more out of touch. And most of the people saying this sh*t are making six figures and or are wealthy anyway. You go ask somebody in line at the unemployment office if they give a sh*t about deficits. I dare you. I double dog dare you. Go find a house with a foreclosure sign out front and ask those people if they want the Government not to spend money right now. I wish some of these dumb ass politicians would walk down a blue collar neighborhood where people are struggling and try preaching some of their special brand of bullsh*t. They would get their ass kicked in a major way. So let them keep coming up with fuzzy math, most of them won't be on Capitol Hill much longer anyway.
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Well, Rush claimed the other day that there is no "forclosure" storm.
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I also remember, some years ago, he claimed that Washington State had to let forest fires burn because the helicopters were not allowed to take water out of the streams because of the salmon.
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And the insurance CEO on the other thread really thinks that he, and the GOP in general, is smart! -
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I suggest that people take a few minutes to read the Politico comment thread. Any confidence you have that people understand what's going on and are not susceptible to these sorts of dishonest arguments will be instantly dashed.
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There's no shortage of slogan spouting idjits out there. -
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I think Republican stragedy is to hold their hands over their ears and yell:
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Stop scaring us! Nothing is happening! -
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Paul Dirks
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Don't be fooled by Politico. The same losers come there everyday and post the same sh*t over and over again. That was my hangout prior to coming over to Swampland. You can go to any thread at that site and see the same people constantly repeating themselves. They definitely aren't reflective of America at large. A good number of them also claimed McCain was going to win up until the day of the election. -
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It has come to this: Who presents a greater threat to the United States, terrorists or Republicans? Both apparently want the US to fail. One can only come out a cave and make pronouncements. The other is willfully attempting to destroy the country.
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"If you spread the cost, at no interest, of the Bernanke/GOP bailout throughout the entire Hadean, Archaen, Proterazoic, and Phanerazoic eons of the Earth's history the payments would amount to $131/Month."
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It must look even more expensive to the religious crazies who insist the world is only 6000 years old. -
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sgwhite, you nail it completely and exemplify what the villagers usually don't get, what real life is like for real people who don't have jobs at Time, the NYT, Fox, MSNBC, etc. The right track/wrong track number that they all ignored when playing their 24 hour news cycle gotcha game all last year. The same way they utterly miss how real people see the money situation now... hint, it is NOT about all the process nonsense, and whatever the Repugnicons decide to call a sound bite news conference about. One reads, sometimes here by MS and certainly a lot elsewhere, all these critical minutiae about Obama, but one NEVER reads any coherent Republican proposal for dealing with anything, nor any regret or even speculation around what it would be like to have President McCain, Vice President Palin, Secretary of the Treasury Gramm, Chief of Staff Lindsey Graham, and SuperAdvisor Samuel-not-Joe the Nonentity-not-Plumber in charge at this point in time... just imagine it for a moment....
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sgwhiteinfla: I agree, the losers on Politico are all on Republican joy juice. It is inhabited by a cadre of Republican loyalist and no more represents mainstream America than Rush does. We worry to much about the various Republican three ring circuses.
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newfloridian:
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The Republicans. No question. Nine-Eleven never had this kind of impact, with all due respect to the victims and those who served! -
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They definitely aren't reflective of America at large..
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But they are part of the feedback loop within Scherer's and Tapper's and Kurtz's world.
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There are plenty of good reasons to be concerned about excessive government spending-borrowing-waste. Unfortunately actual analysis of our alternatives are just as taboo within the Press corps as the notion that the US is capable of trespass of foreign soil. -
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arbitrarystring:
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Think it works out to around a billion a month at no interest (72000 months).
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Not quite MS's "billion an hour", but we are getting within three orders of magnitude (712x)!
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