Billions and Billions……
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." -- Attributed to Everett Dirksen (1896 – 1969), U.S. Senator from Illinois1
Every day we hear about government spending. It seems like there’s no shortage of needs for the government to fulfill. And every one of them takes money. Lots of money. Politicians propose programs that always cost billions of dollars. In senator Dirkson’s day programs were a few billion dollars and the Federal budget was about $300 billion. Nowadays programs are in the hundreds of billions and, some now are in the trillions!
Most of us will never have or be worth a million dollars. And probably none of us will ever be worth a billion dollars. In fact, according to Forbes, there are only about 2,750 billionaires in the world in 2021. A pretty exclusive club.
But let’s pause a minute to try to comprehend a billion.
Yes, there are comparisons that are the standard fare of this type of story:
A billion pennies laid end to end would be 11,837 miles long, or about the distance from Philadelphia, PA to Perth Australia. (FYI, a trillion pennies would make 24 trips to the moon and back.)
A billion grains of sand would be a mess!
Here’s another way to look at it:
A billion seconds ago it was 1989.
A billion minutes ago people who knew Jesus could have been alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
A billion days ago no one walked on two feet on earth. Perhaps except for the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
A billion dollars ago was only 1 hour and 20 minutes, at the rate our government spends.
Yup, at the rate our government spends it.
So, when we talk about the government spending money, keep in mind the primary way they fund spending is by taxation.
Ok, so how much is a billion dollars when the U.S. government taxes it?
In 2020 the IRS collected $1,203,679,725,000 from 157,195,302 individual taxpayers. That’s an average of $7,657 that everyone paid, from Warren Buffet to the high school kid flipping burgers.
So, the equivalent of a billion dollars in revenue is produced from taxing the hard work of 130,595 taxpayers.
This means that every time some politician cavalierly proposes spending a billion dollars, he’s spending the taxable efforts of 130,000 taxpayers. That’s the equivalent of the population of Cedar Rapids, IA, New Haven, CT or Midland, TX. And $10 billion is the equivalent of Dallas, TX.
Think about that.
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This week we lost one of the greats in American comedy. Norm Macdonald was a master of droll humor. He was fearless in his comedy in that he did comedy without worrying about how it would affect his career. This is what got him booted from Saturday Night Live and The View.
This is one of the funniest bits ever on Saturday Night Live. I cry laughing every time I watch it.
Norm, you’ll be missed!
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“Billions and Billions….” — “It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it.”― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life & Death at the Brink of the Millennium
https://www.dirksencenter.org/research-collections/everett-m-dirksen/dirksen-record/billion-here-billion-there