Wednesday, March 11, 2009

How about that Fuzzy Math?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted that since President Obama took office, Congress has spent about $1 billion dollars an hour.
“In just 50 days, Congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion between the Stimulus and the Omnibus,” McConnell says. “To put that in perspective, that’s about $24 billion a day, or about $1 billion an hour—most of it borrowed. There’s simply no question: government spending has spun out of control.”
The math: 50 days times 24 hours equals 1,200 hours. 1,200 times 1 billion equals 1.2 trillion (a thousand billions is a trillion).
That is the nature of our spending and it is poised to go up as the Senate will vote today on a $410 billion bill to fund the federal government. That would push the hourly spending rate on this 51st day of the Obama presidency to just over $1.3 billion per hour.

By the way the federal minimum wage is now $6.55 per hour, or 0.000000000004 percent of the over $1.3 billion that the government is spending. I don't even know how to express that in words, but it is really, really, really damn small. How is that supposed to make people feel?

No comments: