The Ten Trillion Dollar Man!
September 30, 2008
I’m sure a million other people have used that title. But I couldn’t think of a better one tonight. Huge numbers make my head hurt.
Anyways, Calculated Risk has been predicting that George W. Bush would leave us with a $10,000,000,000,000.00 debt (doesn’t that make you head hurt a little?). CR has two posts in the past 24 hours that give a bit of a progress update without going into a ton of detail (latest here. Next to latest here).
I had made an estimate in a previous post that George, ever the procrastinator, would only reach $10 tril in his last days in office based on a projection using the value of $2.17 billion per day being added to the national debt in the past year. Well Our President does not miss an opportunity to be misunderestimated. At the very same site that showed a $2.17B per day growth average over the past year just six days ago, they now have $2.56B being added on in the past year! The national debt has grown, according to their clock, by about $155 billion in the past six days (~$26 billion/day)! WOW. That is an unbelievable climb (though, as CR’s most recent post shows, some of it may be temporary).
The difference between $2.17B per day and $2.56B per day is $142.5B over 365.25 days. That appears to be the difference in debt growth between the periods spanning September 20, 2007 –> September 25, 2007 and September 25, 2008 –> September 30, 2008.
Sorry for all this pointless math, but my brain is seriously damaged from seeing this. I don’t even know what it means or if it means anything. I just know that there are about 39 people spinning in their graves right now.
… and the cow goes moo
Quick note:
Imagine if you were a living president who had managed, through much difficulty and at great political expense, to reduce or at least slow the increase in the national debt (two presidents come to mind… out of four living presidents)… You suffered the slings and the arrows of those looking for promises to be made good. You performed difficult triage on meaningful programs, deciding which must die so others might live without dooming our children to servicing our reckless spending. You lost allies in Congress who wished to bring projects and federal dollars back home to their constituents to campaign around. You may even have raised taxes and been promptly tossed out of office. And probably all for a few hundred billion, at the very most.
George W. Bush wouldn’t wipe his ass with a hundred billion.
If I were a certain unnamed living-President-and-also-father-of-current-president, I would be sobbing uncontrollably right now, wiping my tears with surplus Bush-Quayle ‘96 t-shirts.
Actually, I’m not a certain unnamed living-President-and-also-father-of-current-president and I’m STILL near tears. Furthermore, I’m a Canadian! This isn’t even my debt!
… the metacow
[...] way, was an hilarious anecdote in Kristof’s article). It is because the beneficiaries of a $10 trillion-dollar-in-debt taxpayer community’s benevolence are, in fact, odiously selfish. And a reminder that it is [...]
[...] to Congress, even Ten-Trillionaire George W. Bush looks like the model of fiscal restraint. THAT’S an [...]