Numbers and the Presidential Election

It happens every four years and it gets worse every single time.  Wake up, Mister and Mistress America!  You've got to run out and vote for the next President of the United States and a host of other issues, and remember - it is your very own Constitutional right to have a loud, uninformed and heavily biased opinion on everything.  Don't listen, don't read and for Heaven's sake, do not let the facts stand in the way of your feelings.

Before I decompose the rest of this rant, I want to issue a non-standard disclaimer, to wit: I am a long way from being a math major.  The results of very basic equations have always frightened me a little, particularly if I get a result that I didn't expect.  Having gone over the rough draft of this rant several times, I'm not certain that I'm right.  I am certain I need two fingers of bourbon before I go any further.


A couple years back I was at a hotel in Columbus attending a convention, and as Big Mike and I left we passed a large group of cops gearing up for some kind of invasion or something.  I asked a crazy guy who was talking to himself what was going on, and was informed that the Moonbats were having an official luncheon in honor of the Ayatollah Obama putting the screws to the hoi polloi again, but the Ayatollah couldn't make it so the Vice President of the United States was going to be here.  I thanked him and hurried to catch up to Big Mike, but when I told Mike what was up I realized that I could not remember the name of the Vice President, nor could I remember what he looked like.  When I confessed as much to Big Mike, he was amused but not surprised.

You see, the Vice President is not chosen for his outstanding leadership abilities, his intelligence or his scholastic achievements (Dan Quayle anyone?).  The VP is chosen by The Prez and The Party because he is breathing, he hasn't been caught participating in a major scandal (yet - Spiro T. Agnew comes to mind) and he'll follow directions and not make waves.  Biden is all that and a natural eleven with five grand on the come line.  Biden is a zero, and he was chosen because The Ayatollah Obama likes to be surrounded by cooperative zeros.

Reading this, you might gather that I don't like President Obama.  You're quite right.  I don't like him, I don't like his choice for VP and I think he's done a terrible job as President.  He'll likely go down in history as one of the five worst presidents of the U.S. in spite of the inevitable Hell raised by every single Black Self-Interest Political Group in the entire world.  We've had almost four years of misery, courtesy of the Ayatollah Obama, who has failed to close Gitmo, failed to rid us of the (un)Patriot Act and failed to control spending.  Which brings me to the uncertain portion of my rant.

As of September 4, 2012 the United States Federal Government is $16.4 trillion dollars in debt.  That's a lot of dead presidents.  In fact, the number is larger than anything I can imagine, and I've got a big imagination.  I decided to take a hard look at one trillion smackers and go from there.

Number and Amount

$1	One dollar, otherwise known as a peanut, single or bone.
$1	One dollar, otherwise known as a peanut, single or bone.
$10	Ten dollars, also known as a saw buck or a tenner.
$100	One hundred dollars, a c-note, a Franklin, a Benjamin or a Century.
$1,000	One thousand dollars. A grand.
$10,000	Ten thousand dollars. Ten grand.
$100,000	One hundred thousand dollars. A hundred grand, or a hundred thou.
$1,000,000	One million dollars. A mil. A phone number income.
$10,000,000	Ten million dollars. Ten mil.
$100,000,000	One hundred million dollars. A hundred mil.
$1,000,000,000	One billion dollars.
$10,000,000,000	Ten billion dollars.
$100,000,000,000	One hundred billion dollars.
$1,000,000,000,000	One trillion dollars.

The idea of any amount over one million is incomprehensible to me, so I'm clueless as to the real amount of one trillion, let alone sixteen trillion.  Still, I'm persistent.  The way I figure it is that since I was born on Thursday, October 2 in 1952, and if I lived to be a hundred I'd cash in my chips on Wednesday, October 2 in 2052, this would give me precisely 36,526 days to track down all the women and whiskey a man like me could ever want.  So what's that got to do with this?  Well, here it is.  If you take one trillion dollars and divide it by 36,526 days (100 years), you'll get $27,377,758.31.  That's twenty seven million, three hundred and seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight dollars and thirty-one cents a day.

That means that every single day for one hundred years I would have to spend twenty seven million and change, and I still wouldn't equal the amount of debt the U.S. Federal government has right now, today.  I'll take a shot at it though.

Where to begin?  I'd start with a mansion or two.  A yacht, then a super yacht.  An island in the Florida Keys.  A few more mansions overseas, and a luxury 747 airliner so I can visit all these mansions.  Add a string of polo ponies and a castle in Europe.  I'd build my own art museum and stuff it full of rare art classics.  Buy a few distilleries and make up my own special blend.  Twenty seven million a day?  The month isn't even out and I'm running short of ideas.  No kill animal shelters, half-way houses for the mentally ill and shelters for abused women all across the nation, raises for the people whose job it is to maintain all this crap.  Pleasure palaces with hot and cold running women.  Free college tuition for everyone with the aptitude and work ethic to complete their degree.  That sounds like a lot, but remember: $27,000,000 is filling up my bank account every single day and that will continue for 100 years.  I don't know what else I'd throw the money at.  Medical research maybe?  Feed the hungry and stamp out famine for a day?  Buy a bunch of land, and I mean a bunch of it, then start my own State where there is no income tax and a bunch of stuff people like to do is perfectly legal.  After a few weeks I'd secede from the Union.  Why not?  The kind of people who'd live in a State I started up would be damned glad to get rid of the fuckups, jackwagons and fat-fingered professional politicos in Washington.  Shoot, I might ever get a statue out of the deal.  I'd pay for it, of course.

My point, if there is one, is that the amount of money that the Federal government owes to Lord only knows who doesn't exist.  I tried dealing with one trillion in my rambling example, and I pretty much struck out.  The Federal government owes 16 trillion; not just one.

There isn't that much wealth to be had and yet our government owes it.  Our government leaders understand that the wealth, the ability to pay off the debt, does not exist.  We, the Great Unwashed, just make the minimum payment every month when we have to.  They, the U.S. Government, continue to spend money and add to the debt faster than we can pay it off.  Which we can't do anyway.

I read this headline in the Washington Post the other day: Obama, Romney campaigns clash on Labor Day over whether Americans are better off and was somewhat heartened.  Surely both parties have finally found something on which they agree.  From the paper:

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan brought the fight directly to them in North Carolina, hitting President Obama hard on the question of whether Americans are better off now than when Obama took office.

“He can’t tell you that you’re better off,” Ryan said at an appearance in Greenville. “Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are now.”

“Folks, let me make something clear — say it to the press,” Vice President Biden said during a campaign stop in Detroit. “America is better off today than they left us when they left. . . . Let me just sum it up this way, folks. . . . Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”

Biden.  That's the man's name.  Biden.  Why can't I remember that?  Paul Ryan is quite right.  We are not better off now than we were at the beginning of the Ayatollah Obama's term.  That does not mean that the Motor City, Mittchigan Pagan will do a perfect job.  Romney's father was governor of Michigan, which is a State that is not noted for low taxes and a government that is sensitive to the wants and needs of the inhabitants.  Check out Detroit as an example of the Michigan economy.  The Mittchigan Pagan has bagged a lot of his time running Taxsachusetts, which is not reassuring given the Draconian gun laws in Massachusetts and the staggering tax rate, both of which he completely failed to fix.

His choice for Vice President, Paul Ryan, is interesting.  Mr. Ryan is from Janesville, Wisconsin where the unemployment rate was about 29% a few years back when G.M. closed down.  Many people have left and others have dropped off the unemployment radar, so it's safe to say the unemployment rate has dropped a little.  Ryan has also worked on the national budget, so that trillion dollar business I wrote about up above has his fingerprints on it.  Not all over it, but on it.

I'm disgusted by both sides.  I think that it's very likely that the Mittchigan Pagan will win this one, which will spare us another four years of the Ayatollah Obama and maybe four more of what's his name - Biden!  But very frankly, I don't think it will make much difference.  Both men want to keep spending, neither one wants to govern a truly free people, and if the commercial press is lucky the Mittchigan Pagan will find a way to legalize polygamy and we'll get to see a royal wedding at the White House... with the first and second ladies.