Dear Reader,
How much “money” have the fiscal and monetary authorities fanned into existence since 2007?
Here are your choices:
A: $19 trillion
B: $23 trillion
C: $31 trillion
D: $37 trillion
The devil is in me today. Let me then befuddle, confound and dizzy you with another selection:
E: $40 trillion.
What is the answer? You will have it shortly.
“Extraordinary Measures” to Fund Government
I first note that Ms. Yellen has struck her whelky head against the debt ceiling, so-called.
Statute forbids the United States Treasury from borrowing additional monies… until Congress elevates the existing debt ceiling.
Until it does the outgoing secretary — and her successor — must resort to “extraordinary measures” to keep Uncle Samuel in funds.
Thus she has begun ransacking coat pockets and foraging for strayed coins beneath sofa pillows.
Observers believe she can scare up enough to keep the old deadbeat going through summer.
Yet to return to our question:
How much “money” have the fiscal and monetary authorities fanned into existence since 2007?
Drumroll, Please…
Here again are your choices:
A: $19 trillion
B: $23 trillion
C: $31 trillion
D: $37 trillion
E: $40 trillion.
Have you selected your answer?
The answer is E — the fiscal and monetary authorities have fanned $40 trillion into existence since 2007.
Yet large numbers dull the sober senses… as large liquor bottles dull the sober senses.
They glaze the eyes. They stupefy and gobsmack.
Such as, for example, 40 trillion.
Let us therefore reduce the airy abstract to hard concrete…
WHAT???!!!
The Evening Vanguard is a financial publication. Money is its central concern. Thus I ask:
How much time would be required to print $1 trillion?
Assume you are given command of the printing press at Washington. You are told off to print $1 trillion.
Yet you are limited to printing $1 bills.
You are exceptionally energetic, however. Rest is your sworn foe… and you guzzle coffee by the vat.
And so you print one $1 bill each second of each day, midnight to midnight, 365 days of the 365.
How much time is required to print $1 trillion? Author Bill Bryson:
- If you initialed $1 per second, you would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days — something over three years — to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire… But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar.
31,709.8 years! In the year 33,734, you may wipe the sweat from your brow… and quit.
Assuming the Almighty grants you your threescore and 10 — 70 years — you will require 481.92 lifetimes to retire this debt.
Multiply It 40 Times
Yet you have merely printed $1 trillion. Now multiply the business 40 times, enslaved by identical rules.
Printing $40 trillion… requires the ceaseless labor of 1,268,392 years… or 18,119.88 lifetimes.
How do you like it?
Thus you may find your future… bleak.
Yet a sense of perspective, as always, proves invaluable. Like me, I assume you are a sinner.
Would you prefer to spend those 1,268,392 years roasting in Hell?
Regardless: The United States government and its central bank have conjured $40 trillion within a mere 18 years.
They have not been limited to printing $1 bills of course. The attainment nonetheless stupefies and gobsmacks.
It sends the sober senses careening into delirious intoxication.
1,151,065.74 Years of Ceaseless Labor
Let us now consider another enormity — the national debt — presently running to $36.3 trillion.
You are told off to retire this debt in full. Each dollar you print equals one less dollar of national debt.
Yet you must obey the identical rules. Again, you are reduced to printing $1 bills.
Yet you are consecrated to frugality in government. You therefore labor with fantastic, nearly inconceivable, abandon.
Again, your nose presses against the grindstone each and every hour of the 24, 365 days of the 365.
How long before you satisfy this $36.3 trillion debt?
We multiply 31,709.8 years by 36.3. Here is what we learn:
Reducing today’s $36.3 trillion debt to $0… would require 1,151,065.74 years of ceaseless labor — or 16443.79 lifetimes.
Commence today and the job is done in the year of our Lord 1,153,090.
Yet again, perspective proves beneficial. Printing $36.3 trillion requires 117,327 fewer laboring years than printing $40 trillion.
66% of All Income Taxes Just to Service the Debt
And I am not factoring interest on this debt. I will spare you the calculations for fear of your sanity.
I note merely that interest payments on the nation’s debt ran to $140 billion last month.
That figure represents some 66% of all personal income taxes Uncle Samuel took in last month.
The business seems beyond all human agency, beyond all control.
‘What can I do?’ a fellow wonders. His shoulders he shrugs. His head he bows.
He may cluck-cluck his opposition to it all — and what sane man does not?
The Modern Monetary Theory zanies may be for it. They argue that greater and greater debt is the greatest elixir.
They believe debt forms the granite foundation of wealth everlasting.
But our normal man, he is no zany. He has good, hard sense in him. He sees debt in its true aspect.
Some Ideas Are so Dumb, Only an Intellectual Could Believe Them
The normal man’s trouble is that he lacks a doctoral degree in the economic sciences.
That is, his understanding lacks “sophistication.”
Thus Mr. Orwell hooked onto something when he wrote:
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Yet ordinary men do not direct the monetary and fiscal arms of the United States government.
Fools direct the monetary and fiscal arms of the United States government.
And foolish people perform foolish acts that end in fool-inspired outcomes.
They are invariably poor outcomes. At times, dreadful outcomes.
“Experience keeps a hard school,” said old Benny Franklin. He also said:
“Fools will learn in no other.”
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
