Let's put Swine Flu and $22 Million into Perspective

My good friend Tom and I don’t agree politically very often- so I’m really glad to be in his corner on the issue of the evils of the bailout money and the tragedy that our government is spending our tax dollars to salvage really awful, shortsighted, and greedy decisions within the financial district. I’m glad that we can also agree that the government has no right to keep a failing US Car industry afloat by stealing money from its citizens after they chose to support non-US brands instead.

While it’s shocking to me that we can throw out $700 billion at the financial district, I don’t really think that most people truly understand numbers this big. Billions of dollars are simply so much money that we can’t wrap our minds around it. We simply can’t garner the mental capacity to understand how much that really is.

And because we don’t really have the ability to wrap our mind around numbers that big, the media takes advantage of the situation and pulls data that makes us even more angry about the situation. Take, for example, the recent bonuses that AIG gave their upper tier executives. When we heard that they gave their executives Millions of Dollars in bonuses (paid out of the billions of bailout funds), it turned into hysteria.

Now, they’re reporting that $22 Million have been spent lobbying the government to relax some of the very restrictions that have been put in place to keep these sort of things from happening. We can’t help but freak out at this point. They’re seriously using MILLIONS that WE gave them to LOBBY for GREEDY ENDS?

-- HANG ON: I need to interject a side comment here for a moment to remind readers that I’m very much against restrictions and government intervention in the market, I think that Federal government should keep its head OUT of the private sector. But I also believe that corporations and big businesses have no right to buy off congress, either. When the government sticks its head into the market it’s almost always results in the kind of socialism that results in stagnation and poverty. When businesses (or religions) stick their head into government it almost always results in fascism and corporatism that results in stagnation and poverty. So, both are terrible. I wish they’d leave each other alone. :END of RANT --

OK, before we get too carried away, let’s stop our anger for a moment and put these monies into perspective.  $22 Million is a lot, right? Here’s what it looks like numerically:

$22,000,000.00

It’s a big number. More than any of us will probably see in our lifetime.
But let’s see how it stacks up against $700 Billion? Here's the two amounts next to each other.

$22,000,000.00
$700,000,000,000.00

OK, so $700 billion is obviously a lot bigger, right?

But these numbers are still so much bigger than the sort of money we're used to exchanging that it's still a bit hard to put these into perspective. So, let’s go back to 7th grade math for a moment and kill some of those extra zeros. This will result in a proportional set of numbers that are a little smaller- a little closer to what we might expect to interact with in our lifetimes.

$22
$700,000

These two sets of numbers are a little more manageable. I’ve spent $22 dollars within the past week.

But what about that $700,000?

I still feel like that sum is a little too big. It’s the cost of a really nice house rather than the sort of money that I’d be able to exchange on a frequent basis. So let’s make this number $700 instead. That’s more like the amount of money I might get in a paycheck (or paychecks depending on job).

$.02
$700.00

When we make these numbers comparable to what normal Americans interact with on a daily basis- it turns out to be about the same as a guy who takes his $700 paycheck (or to make the analogy even more pertinent takes a month’s worth of unemployment claims) and tries to put in his “2 cents” worth to a senator or representative.

Of course, the principle remains the same- “why would any of these businesses spend money that wasn’t theirs to begin with on things that are just going to make the public enraged?”

But when we put it in perspective these sums should actually beg a different question- Why does anyone need $700 BILLION dollars? What on earth did they do to get that far into debt that $22 million dollars of lobbying is comparably 2 cents- a sum so small that it doesn’t even seem to matter?

But another story here is that we need to be careful lest our heads and hearts and opinion be swayed by manipulated data from the media. Given the right perspective, it’s easy to believe things about certain individuals or governments or situations that aren’t actually the reality.

Take for example the “Swine Flu” thing that’s going around. Sure, we need to be careful because it’s a potentially lethal disease. But so is the regular flu. In fact, the regular flu kills off thousands of humans each year in the United States alone. So far there haven’t been ANY substantiated fatalities in the US from Swine Flu.

Which one is more dangerous? Which one should we truly be scared of?

Apparently, that doesn’t matter. The media needs to find a story that will make us tune into their broadcast. They need to create emotions and so they feed us swine flu hysteria and bring on their experts to remind us that the evil financial district is spending huge sums of money with the bailout we gave them.

Don’t get sucked in; do the math and check the facts.

And don’t freak out.