Column by George Sibley
Government – April 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
A TRILLION. Two trillion. That’s the size, in dollars, of the budget proposed by another of those Presidents who was supposedly going to cut federal spending. Turns out he only meant to cut revenues; we just assumed that meant he would also be cutting spending.
Of course, this is a guy who never had to think much about budgeting. But trillions? And I’m still trying to get my mind around the concept of “billion,” a one followed by nine zeroes. With a trillion, you’re tacking on three more zeroes, and I run out of fingers so it all gets abstract unless I take off my shoes.
When I was a kid, “trillion” was interchangeable with “zillion,” the term we used to describe an unimaginable quantity. Nothing of course topped “bazillion,” but I suppose it won’t be too long before a Republican president is sending a budget — or at least a spending request — of that size to Congress. It was a Republican who broke the trillion barrier back in 1987. For spending anyway; revenues that year were typically short of a trillion. But it must be remembered that there was another evil empire to defeat then. Damn. Don’t we ever run out of those things?
But trillions, bazillions – like I say, I’m still trying to get my mind around a billion. The world’s first billionaire, as I remember, was Scrooge McDuck. As a kid back in those dark ages, I loved Uncle Scrooge comics. They always seemed to start, or end, or both, in Scrooge’s vault, a huge room that was about three-fourths full of cash and coins. Scrooge played in that room like a porpoise, diving and swimming around in his money.
But we never saw him counting it, and the other day, I figured out why. Suppose he had a mere billion dollars in that vault, and he decided to count it. Suppose he could count an average of one dollar per second, and worked around the clock, 24/7 , till he was finished. Working alone, it would have taken him approximately 31 years, 8 months and 15 days to count up a billion dollars. A long time without sleeping and eating. Even if nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey had helped, it would have taken them almost eight years. A trillion — forget it: if they’d started counting when Christ was a baby, they’d still be less than a third of the way done.
Shortly after the President sent what he called his budget to Congress, Forbes magazine came out with its annual tally of billionaires — and Central Coloradans will be disappointed to learn that there is no one from our region on the list. This year, there are only six billionaires from Colorado, and most of them have fewer billions than they had last year; it has been a difficult year for billionaires.
But we can take regional pride in providing modest but direct support to a couple of Colorado’s billionaires. Every time we pay a Qwest phone bill, Phil Anschutz is made a little more secure (although not much more, these days); and every time we drop another dollar into the Wal-Mart sump, John Walton of Durango is incrementally increased. There are five Waltons, all tied for seventh place on the list of the world’s richest, at $16.5 billion each. So if they all started counting now, at a dollar a second — never mind.
BUT I’M STILL TRYING to get my mind around the concept of a billion. What would it be like to have a billion dollars? Suppose you did, and you did something really stupid with it, like just put it in the local savings and loan at the piddling two percent or so interest they pay now. The interest on your billion dollars would be $20 million every year. Your money would be increasing by about $55,000 every day. Most of the people I know in Central Colorado, including myself, would be happy enough with that much every year; most of us would even be willing to work pretty hard for $55,000 a year — since the average per capita income in Central Colorado is less than half that.
So imagine the stress involved with having to deal with that much money coming in every day. And if you were to go to the additional work of investing your billion in something more lucrative, something that paid even more dividends than that every day, rather than just interest? Well, surely it’s all right that that kind of daily income should not be taxed at all, or at least not so much as the personal labor of someone who only has to worry about that much per year.
Back in the days before the federal budget broke the trillion mark, I remember Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois musing on this at budget time: “A billion here, a billion there,” he said, “pretty soon you’re starting to talk about real money.”
But I don’t know. It sure doesn’t seem very real to me from down on the ground in Central Colorado. And that’s just billions — forget trillions.
George Sibley writes and teaches in Gunnison.
