$2.9 Trillion Dollars

On Monday of this week, President Bush unveiled a four-volume, 2,500 page, $2.9 trillion dollar budget for the U.S. Government. My initial thought was to the environment, "How many copies are printed? What a waste of paper; they must recycle since it's the government." I repeated the $2.9 trillion dollar figure in my head.

How much is 2.9 trillion dollars? Round it up to 3 to make it easier. $3,000,000,000,000.00. Twelve zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars. In Jim Loy's article, A Trillion Dollars, he states "It will take me more than 30 years to count (out loud) to one billion and more than 30,000 years to count to one trillion." In other words, 2.9 trillion is a number too high to count and hard to comprehend. My desk calculator only goes to twelve digits--as high as 300 million. It, too, can not compute a trillion dollars.

Of the immense sum, $145.2 billion goes to war, mostly for Iraq and Afghanistan (from October 1) with another $99.6 billion dollars for the remainder of the current fiscal year (to September 30). This is a humdinger of a total. $244.8 billion dollars spent on war for 12 months or $20,400,000,000.00 per month. As you turn a new calendar page, another $20.4 billion of taxpayer dollars goes goodbye. If we collectively decided enough was enough, could we save it and apply it to debt or redirect how the $245 billion dollars was spent?

Mr. David Leonhardt suggests a few ideas in his New York Times article "What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy", he writes:

"Treating heart disease and diabetes, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion." Earlier he mentions that more money could be contributed to the reconstruction of New Orleans.

The President's budget is part of a five year plan to have a balanced budget by 2012. He assumes we'll quit spending money in Iraq (hopefully he's right this time) and various other expenditures. But I ask, can you take five years to balance your family budget or would that land you in Bankruptcy and/or Divorce Court? At our house, if we can't afford something we don't buy it. Sure, we've made plenty of mistakes over the years. When we purchased items on credit, the end result is a future bill that must be paid. We've learned our lesson and work to eliminate our consumer debt, but how about the government? Can it wait to reduce its debt? Can we really afford the war?