Land of Oz

Obama talks about trillions in spending or debt as if it doesn't really amount to all that much. Some studies have found that for many people all numbers over about 1,000 are pretty much the same, just great big numbers. Maybe Obama is one of those people, so here's some help in the form of an illustration given by Ronald Reagan:


If you had a stack of $1,000 bills 4 inches high, you'd have a million dollars.

To have trillion dollars, you'd need a stack over 63 MILES high.

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(Can that be true? Yes:

A trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is a million million (1,000,000 x 1,000,000).

If a 4-inch stack is a million dollars, then a trillion dollars is a stack a million times that tall.

4,000,000 inches / 12 = 333,333 feet

333,333 feet / 5280 = 63.131 miles)

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Obama's $3.6 trillion 2009 budget projects a deficit of $1.75 trillion dollars.

So he will spend a stack of $1,000 bills over 227 miles high, and leave a deficit over 110 miles high.

Don't forget that municipalities and states have their own budgets -- and their own deficits to pile on top of the Federal one.

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Obama is a guy with zero executive or business experience; he never ran so much as a church bake sale before ascending to the Presidency. What he is, above all, is full of himself, with a level of self-regard that's frankly bizarre. His preternatural self-confidence borders on the pathological, because there is no background of difficult, hard-won accomplishment to justify it. Above all, he has no history of chastening experience, and people like that are always dangerous for their lack of any sense of limitation or perspective. Obama is a Greek tragedy waiting to happen, and we are all along for the ride.

So, here we are, in the Land of Oz, with an untested, ego-maniac naif behind the curtain merrily pulling the levers of the preeminent military and economic power on the planet. This country, the world's oldest constitutional democracy, is a patrimony built over centuries of untold effort and sacrifice, but it won't take nearly that long in the other direction.

You get what you ask for at the ballot box, and it looks like we, and our children and grandchildren, are going to get it good and hard. Neither the markets nor our foreign adversaries care one whit about nicely delivered speeches, and they will not share in our delusions.

Byron