Dollars and Sense

I don't know about any of you, but I am no economist. As a matter of fact, I'm not really that great with money. So it makes it somewhat difficult to completely understand the current circumstances that our country's economy finds itself in. I listened to the press conference given by President Obama on Monday, and as much as I root for Obama to succeed as the President, I couldn't really get with his economic stimulus plan. I mean, the last number that I heard about the bill is that it would cost us around 750 billion dollars. Some of that is to jump start the economy, but there's no guarantee that it will work. According to Vice-President Joe Biden, if we do everything right, there's still a 30% chance that all of the money that we're committing to spending will have no positive effect. That's no good. I mean, if you spend 750 billion dollars, you expect that it will drastically improve your current circumstances.

I heard a little bit of math that will show just how much money 750 billion dollars is. If you were to spend one million dollars a day on every day that has existed since Jesus walked the Earth, you still wouldn't have spent 750 billion dollars. Here's the math. Its 2009, but Jesus died at the age of 33. So its been 1,976 years since then. A million dollars spent every day for a years is 365 million. Multiply that times 1,976, and you come up with $721,240,000,000. Tack on another 494 million dollars to compensate for those extra February 29ths, and you have a grand total of 721 billion, 734 million dollars. Almost 30 billion less than what the stimulus plan calls for. I don't know about you, but when you talk about that kind of math, I'm gonna say that it should have better than a 70% chance of success.

Now I know that some of you are gonna say that Bush asked for nearly the same amount for the TARP fund. (Troubled Assets Relief Program). And though I wasn't exactly in favor of handing out that money, it was on a slightly different scale. As I understand it, the TARP money that has been given out is money that at some point and time, when the banks become profitable again, the Government will be repaid that money. Now don't get me wrong, getting money from the Government is like "borrowing" $100 from your mother. Yes you technically owe her, but if you only give her back say $50, and it takes two months for her to get that, its not like she's gonna send Barry Bonds to take out your knees with one swing. (By the way mom, I know I still owe you, just give me a little more time. Lol). Same thing with the government. As all of this was presented to us on Monday, I also was struck by how unsure President Obama seemed about the whole ordeal. I mean, the brotha is usually cool, calm, and well spoken on matters. To me, it seemed like he was just as unsure, and at a loss about the whole mess. That's not a major problem per se, but the President of the United States is like the coach of a football team. Right now the US is down by 30 at halftime, and that speech was supposed to inspire us to come out and take it to the opponent in the second half. Well, what I gathered from his speech is that we're probably gonna lose. Hell, I almost would have appreciated it more if Barack would've just said "Look, things are bad. Bad to a degree that I can't really comprehend. Now I know that you guys elected me to fix the problem. In turn, I have chosen the best in the business. And I believe in these people. I can't tell you everything that they're gonna do, because much of it is beyond my understanding. But I guarantee you that we're gonna take care of this". Now I know that saying something like that is beyond the scope of most politicians, but it would have made me more confident that we could actually erase this 30 point halftime deficit.

So that's just my take on the current economic crisis. A part of me feels that though things are bad, they're no worse than anything we've faced in the past. The difference is that we as a country have made significant improvement in our quality of life since we last found ourselves in similar circumstances. And though we don't want to admit it, we really screwed up by buying $40,000 cars, and $500,000 homes on student loan inflated $35,000 salaries. Its gonna hurt people, but maybe this is exactly what we needed to get back to living the "right" kind of lives.

-DrizaDre-