Pondering all those billions (July 9)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
President Obama, as you may have heard, is thinking of launching another $750 billion economic stimulus, because the first one doesn’t seem to have worked as well as he thought it would.
I think the problem he has is that nobody really believes all that much money exists in the first place.
Here in California, the governor and the Legislature are wringing their hands over a mere $26 billion deficit, but most of us couldn’t care less. We just don’t believe there is that much money.
Hardly anybody has ever seen $750 billion or $26 billion. Oh, you might see it written in a newspaper article (like here, for instance). But for all anybody knows how much that is, you might as well be reading Martian.
Most of us are used to much smaller amounts. I know, I am.
I have so little money that the bank doesn’t even bother putting it in the safe. Sometimes I go to the bank to look at my money, and the banker, happy to show what good care he’s taking of it, takes me to a closet near the lunchroom.
There, on a shelf, is a Mason jar full of change and a couple of small stacks of bills bound by rubber bands. That’s the kind of money I’m used to.
If I took $750 billion in cash into the bank, the banker would have to run out and rent a bunch of warehouses to keep it in, which you never see happening. Instead, the high rollers trade money around by putting numbers on pieces of paper, or even more ethereally, through electronic signals.
To those of us, like me, who are used to counting on our fingers, all that money — especially $750 billion — is imaginary.
However, it would not be imaginary if Obama sent every American, adults and kids, $2,343.75. And we would not want it in the form of checks. We would want it in quarters. That would be change we could believe in.
