The Old Coot zeros in, Article # 1,097 Published 09/18/2024.

 The Old Coot wants to see the zeros.

By Merlin Lessler

 It’s time to bring back the zeros. These zeros – 000 and 000 and 000 and 000. All twelve!  The print media writes things like, “The senate passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill today.” We don’t blink an eye. What is a trillion? More than a billion, but what is it really? How about if they ended the shortcut and put it out there as - $1,200,000,000,000. That might catch our eye. It might make us wonder how we can afford it. How much more will “we” be taxed.

Even the TV & radio media drop the ball. $1.2 trillion. Ho Hum. How about saying, twelve hundred piles of billion-dollar bundles. Or better yet, twelve hundred thousand piles of million dollar bundles. It might perk our interest a little more.

They do this type of clarification all the time with the weather! “It’s going to be 86 degrees today, but the heat/humidity index will make it feel more like 100.” Or, “It’s going to be 16 degrees tomorrow morning, but with the wind chill factor it will feel like five below.”

Once the money that Washington and Albany threw around got to be more than a million, a disconnect occurred between the spenders and the people that pay the bill. A billion here, a billion there. We hardly knew the difference between a billion and a million after a while. It didn’t dawn on us often enough, that a billion is one-thousand million. Line up 1,000 millionaires, each sitting on a pile of one million, dollar bills, take a picture, and that’s what a billion looks like. A trillion is 1,000 times as much as that. Now you’ve got the average American’s attention. Oh yes, we need the media to pay as much attention to the politicians’ love of spending as they do trying to scare us about the weather, which is a trillion times less important.

Comments? – Send to mlessler7@gmail.com