Earlier this month USA Today splashed a headline on its front page that declared: “U.S. owes $62 trillion.” I wrote a couple blog posts about it — one on the alarming size of the number and another on its juxtaposition with the Anthony Weiner story. It turns out this number — a staggering debt of $534,000 per household — has caused quite the controversy. James Agresti, president of Just Facts, wrote to me about an editorial from Bloomberg taking USA Today to task for making a miscalculation. That came as a shocker to …
Billion used to be a big number in the United States, but today trillion is tossed around with increasing regularity. We could use your help communicating its significance. Whether it’s the $14.3 trillion public debt or the $62 trillion owed for the government’s unfunded liabilities, the number is so large that many folks have no real comprehension of what it means. How, then, do you convey its size? Over the past year, my colleague Bill Beach and I have traveled to several cities across the country to talk about the …
A million here, a million there, and pretty soon we’ve got real money. So said Illinois’s Sen. Everett Dirksen, the long-time Minority Leader during the 1960s. who often reminded his colleagues about how quickly a million here and there added up to enormous sums of public spending. Today, of course, its billions, and Members of Congress spend that denomination with the ease they used to spend millions. However, do Members or most of the general public have a solid grasp of how large a number a billion actually is? To …
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership are frantically trying to find enough votes to pass their giant 2,032 page health care legislation this weekend. But before Speaker Pelosi and liberals in Congress pass their big bill, the American taxpayers should be fully aware of the full price tag of this monster. As Heritage analysts noted earlier in the week, the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill (H.R. 3962) but too many in the media have not been reporting its true cost. The true …
