That's a lot of money

Christopher Buckley, or C-Buckz, as I'm tempted to call him (just kidding, although that really makes me wish he'd marry Star Jones so she could be Star-Buckz - sorry, it's been a long week) has an article at the Beast trying to put a handle on how much the $1.2 trillion dollar deficit really is. And while I like what he does, he's taking a macro approach, and before I had read it I was already planning on taking more of a micro approach.

Let's start with Bernie Madoff. One fraud case, 50 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. A whole lot. It averages out to about $170 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Now, you didn't lose $170 in the Madoff fraud case, which you're probably pretty happy about. And that makes you like most Americans - almost all of them in fact. But for every American who didn't get ripped off by Madoff, that means that one of them who did lost an extra 170 bucks. Put another way, if you put all Americans on one side of a giant room with a big line down the middle, then for every single person that got to cross the line to the "didn't invest" side, some investor would have to pay $170. Just think about how long that would take ...

Now think about the stimulus. The tax rebate stimulus in early 2008 was $150 billion. Then TARP was $700 billion. Now Obama proposes another $825 billion. That adds up to $1.675 trillion (Just for fun: $1,675,000,000,000) There are 138 million taxpayers in the United States, so this amounts to $12,140 per taxpayer. That's incredible! Essentially, the federal government is forcing taxpayers to band together and go into (an additional!) $12,140 worth of collective debt each (albeit at a low interest rate, and of course the burden is not evenly distributed).

The entirety of the debt when Clinton left office was under $6 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion with $1 trillion deficits projected indefinitely. And we haven't even gotten to Social Security et al yet.