Last Updated on June 12, 2017
You’ve probably already received this in your inbox at some point.  Here’s the whole thing:
Dear Mr. President:
Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ‘s economy.
Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander
The money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.
You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:
There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the
Following stipulations:
1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.
2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto
Industry fixed.
3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing
Crisis fixed.
It can’t get any easier than that!
If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their
Constituents pay their taxes…
If more money is needed?  If?
People are up in arms over an $850+ billion bailout.  The little price tag for this plan is $40 trillion.  That’s 40,000,000 times $1,000,000.  A lot of zeroes.
What else could you buy for $40 trillion, besides the possible end of the economic slump?  Well, according to sites estimating the cost, you could pay for the War in Iraq 47 times.
A few months back, Boing Boing estimated that the total cost of the bailout was $4.62 trillion dollars, adding that it was more expensive than the Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Iraq war, Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget combined.
This email plan would pay for the current bailout nine times.
So if we’re complaining about how much the bailout itself is going to cost us, something nearly ten times as costly doesn’t sound like such a winning idea, does it?
(Although if anyone wants to send me a million bucks, I promise to spend it wisely.  Just sayin’.)
Here’s the drawback for that plan, though, Geoff. If everyone got a million bucks, the “average” person could buy a car and pay off whatever’s left of their mortgage and presumably still have hundreds of thousands of dollars left over to survive with.
If you have a $350,000 mortgage, even if you only have $75,000 left on it that you owe, and you buy a new car in addition, you’re left with just $25,000…assuming that they don’t then take taxes out of that…you have to get by on that $25,000. You’re 55…let’s say you’ll live to be 85. Could you get by for 30 years on that $25,000, since your retirement would be forced?
The email doesn’t say whether part-time jobs for retirees is acceptable. So unless they are, you have to assume that you’re cut off from the workforce. It would solve an immediate problem now, but create many more for seniors within as little as a year.
I just got that email and found your blog – lol. What if it was $100K for the house and $25K for an American car? That’s only $5TR.
I agree with Paul. We need a better way of making these large numbers understandable to Americans. For instance, instead of saying 850 billion, say: That’s 12.6 trillion hotdogs, end to end, wrapped around the moon twenty-one times. That’s something everyone can relate to.
(I always love it when experts try to use size and distance analogies to describe large numbers.)
Many people are unable to conceptualize large numbers. For some people, anything over 10,000 might as well be infinity. A million, a billion, a trillion, what’s the difference?