Our lives revolve around numbers, telephone numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, gasoline prices, street addresses, and even lottery numbers. As the numbers get larger, they get more impressive or scary, depending on what you are counting.
The distance around the globe is about 24,900 miles. That’s a long way and we can all relate to that. The distance between the earth and the sun is just over 93 million miles, a very long way, and a bit harder to grasp.
The World Health Organization reports the total number of global deaths to date due to Covid 19 is roughly 6.55 million people. That’s a scary number. Encyclopedia Britannica showed an estimated 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 died during World War II. That is very hard to get your head around.
As the numbers we deal with become larger, we tend to round them off and their particular significance lessens.
We need a way to connect these numbers we casually throw around to some reality in our own lives. This is especially true when discussing numbers related to federal government activities. There are no small numbers in Washington!
I recently heard someone make an enlightening connection between numbers and time. We all have a sense of how long one second is. It’s not much time but as it grows to a minute or to an hour, we have a sense of how big that is.
Let’s put that into perspective. We know there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and so on.
How many seconds are there in an hour?
3,600.
How many in a day?
86,400.
In a week there are 604,800 seconds. The numbers get big relatively quickly.
Turn that around by asking yourself how long it takes to get to 1,000,000 seconds.
One million seconds is 11.57 days.
How about one billion seconds? That is 31.8 years!
The difference between one million and one billion is the same as the difference between a couple of weeks and over thirty years!
This helps give you a sense of just how big these big numbers are.
Instead of seconds, think of these numbers as dollars with one dollar equaling one second. Apply that to the numbers they throw around in Washington, two or three hundred million for this program, five hundred million for that program. Those are very small programs. Most projects and budgets are measured in billions or even trillions of dollars.
The EPA budget for FY 2022 is $9,237,153,000, that’s 9.2 billion dollars. Using the seconds per dollar process, that is 9.2 billion seconds or 292.5 years! And that is only one agency in our massive federal government.
The FY 2022 total federal budget proposes $131.8 billion in discretionary budget authority and $1.5 trillion in mandatory funding.
Using the second/dollar conversion for just the mandatory funding portion, that amounts to 47,695 years which is roughly equivalent to when the last ice age was at its peak!
The national government debt is twenty-four TRILLION dollars or 763,125 years if measured in seconds. Dinosaurs roamed the earth 763,125 years ago, some of them even older than many of our current “leaders” roaming the halls of Congress and the Whitehouse.
For me, using this time/dollar comparison brings the staggering government spending numbers into sharp focus. Government spending is wildly out of control and must be checked before we become as extinct as the dinosaurs.
There is a way to get started on the road to recovery.
Article V of the Constitution includes a provision called Convention of States enabling state legislatures to propose amendments to the Constitution. The Resolution presented in all 50 states has three purposes:
1. Impose fiscal restraints on the federal government
2. Limit its power and jurisdiction
3. Impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.
Learn more about this at the Convention of States website. Take action by signing the petition. Get involved. Volunteer your time and talent as part of America's largest grassroots army.
It is up to all of us to rally against the cancerous growth of our federal government and the resulting insidious erosion of our basic rights and freedoms.
