We are not fans of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Flawed 4 Percent Mortgage Refinance Plan, but he did nail Obama’s Trillion Dollar Debt Plan with this observation: “if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion.”
National Review’s Jim Geraghty crunches the numbers to back McConnell’s claim up:
Christ’s birth in year zero one, times 365, times 2009, gets you 733,285,000,000, or a bit over $733 billion. (Yes, I’m leaving out leap years.) You’re not even three-quarters of the way there. (Politifact calculates from 4 B.C.)
Yes, the stimulus is less than a trillion—$819 billion in the version passed by the House. But that’s still a bigger total than a million a day since the first Christmas.
Shouldn't it be "Minority" Leader?
Politifact is correct to calculate it from 4 B.C. because most Biblical scholars are pretty "united" (for lack of a better word) that they think Jesus was born 3 or 4 B.C.
The math involved here is multiplication.
1 million per day times x 365 days per year, x 2000 years = 700+ billion.
Fair enough.
Let's throw in some division:
1 million divided by 300 million Americans. = $0.0033
Gee, if we spent less than half a penny per day since Jesus was born, we wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars.
Does it STILL sound like a lot of money?
Inflation, population growth, the non-existence of American currency for 90% of the time being discussed….
Nuance and details are such a bother, aren't they?
It would seem that williamjacobs is missing the point here. It is not to say that there aren't 300 million Americans or anything about our currency. It is to get across the idea of how big 1 trillion dollars is and how bad a business person you would be considered if you lost 1,000,000 per day since Christ was born. If you did loose that much per day it would still take you over 6 more centuries to have lost your first Trillion dollars. Is that a business anyone would want to invest in or have confidence in? Would you vote that kind of business person to be the head of anything dealing with money? And yet our government is 14 times worse at doing business. WOW!