Time is Money: Money in Time

What is a Billion dollars? Serious money to the average American, but not to our Congress. Both the Senators and all the Congress-critters don't flinch at that kind of money. The recent Senate 'Bazaar' over their version of the Health Care reform Bill is very illustrative of how these politicians view YOUR money.

Trading votes for the end to cloture and thus approving the Bill they High Prince of the Senate Harry Reid bartered away $300 million dollars to get Mary Landrieu from Louisiana to get her to go along, and she was proud of that number. Not to be outdone Ben Nelson from Nebraska wheeled and dealed his way into a deal that exempts Nebraska from having to shoulder any of its share of Medicaid cost increases forever. Although this cost starts out at a mere $45 million dollars, the CBO cost estimate of that little gem over the next 10 years is valued at $1.2 Billion dollars. That is $1.2 Billion dollars that have to be made up by the other 47 states (Massachusetts and Michigan have the same kind of deal all though the terms for those two states is not Forever like Nebraska's). To win the Florida delegation over Harry Reid put in a provision that grandfathers all of Florida's Senior citizens who are on Medicare Advantage. While the rest of the country's Senior citizens will lose this program or benefit, Florida Seniors will continue to enjoy it, cost to YOU and Me, a mere $5 Billion dollars.

Now they throw this money around like they don't own it or care where it comes from, they certainly don't understand that when you are out of money even $1 dollar is too much yet they are willing to buy votes with Billions and Billions of dollars.

What they are out of touch with is not just the value of the Dollar, much less a Billion of them, but also what the magnitude of the actual numbers they are throwing around.

Like I said in the opening, A Billion dollars is a big deal to You and Me the average American. Why is it then that the politicians go to Washington DC and forget all about what this means. Let's refresh a little.

If a Dollar was equal to 1 second let's see where we go in time. 1 Million seconds is the equivalent of 16,667 minutes which amounts to 11 ½ days.

1 Billion seconds is the equivalent of almost 17 million minutes or 278,000 hours or 31 .71 years in time.

Think about that for a moment. If you could spend $1 dollar every second of every minute of every hour in every day, to burn through $1Billion dollars you would have to have started in 1978. That's right, you would have to spend $86,400 dollars every day for almost 32 straight years to eat through $1Billion dollars.

And our government goes through that much money in a little over an hour. All of it borrowed, from our Children.

BT: Jimmy T sends.