Too big to fail - Too much to count

This is something I was just having a look at as today in a class we were talking about people's inability to visualize large numbers. For example, if you hear someone is earning a million dollars a year these days it doesn't sound like that much as we hear about millionaires all the time. When a government spends a billion dollars or like Finland did, 18 billion on war planes, it seems okay because it is the government and again, we hear these numbers all of the time. You know, Whatsapp was bought by Facebook for 19 billion, Apple was the first company to have a trillion dollar valuation etc.

A million dollars earned a year is 20,000 dollars a week. That means that every month I could pay off my mortgage or buy a higher end BMW. A billion dollars spread across the population of Finland is about 2000 dollars each meaning, the purchase of the planes put each man, woman and child about 36,000 dollars more into debt and, people had no say over this. That is about the average yearly salary and then, interest to come.

This is a major inflation driver of course as while everyone thinks that their taxes pay for this, they don't, their future taxes pay for it. However, this money is continually injected into the economy at a exponential rate, never to be paid off but increasingly creating more and more currency that dilutes the pool. While the people who are getting the money from the interest and the government contracts, aren't keeping it as cash that loses value, they are investing it into tangibles.

Anyway, my student I was discussing this with is a dairy farmer and was talking about the largest farms in Australia. Everything is bigger in Texas though right?

Just for reference, No:

The largest cattle station in Australia is in my home state and is named, Anna Creek Station. It is:

Anna Creek Station has an area of 23,677 square kilometres (9,142 sq miwhich is slightly larger than Israel._source

For those counting, that is over 7x larger than the largest farm in Texas. Hard to imagine that kind of size isn't it, we aren't made to be able to though, it is unnatural to our minds. Oh, the next largest farms are also in Australia but Anna Creek Station is actually only third on the list. Number one and two are in China:

Mudanjiang City Mega Farm in manages 22,500,000 acres, which is 91,000 square kilometers and number two is, The Modern Dairy and is located in Anhui and has an area of 11,000,000 acres or about 45,000 square kilometers. That makes those two farms together about 1/5th the size of all of Texas.

This is the thing with large numbers, even now, you and I are having a hard time processing it visually. So as my student and I talked about these things I gave him a visual of what a million dollars might look like, and then a billion. However, here is a very short video, that explains it much more easily and an accompanying link below if you'd rather go to a readable page.

http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html

Now, at the end of that video is the US debt visualized in 2013 at 17 Trillion dollars but, that is not the current debt. In the last 5 years, the US has added another 4 trillion to that amount to be almost 22 trillion dollars. Have a look again, those stacks towering like sky scrapers are stacks of hundred dollar notes. That's a lot of Benjamins.

It really is quite incredible don't you think? All of this debt and almost none of it is attached to anything solid at all yet, it is all classed as very real and affects every person on earth to the point that shifts and markers called will cost people their businesses, houses, cars and all kinds of opportunities - things that are very real indeed.

And people think getting into crypto is risky.

There is no real point to this post other than a reminder that while we hear all of these terms like million, billion and trillion commonly, what it actually is, is a process of desensitization so that we no longer bat an eyelid at their mention. This means governments around the world can keep churning through resources into debt at the cost to citizens without the citizens revolting. Well, that'll change and is changing even though people still don't understand the significance of all the numbers and the influence and impacts it has on them.

If they did, they wouldn't be borrowing more and more and increasing their own personal debt. Of course, when millions and billions seem normal, hundreds of thousands seems cheap for a loan on a house and car. Consumerism driven by the inability to visualize large numbers and, the lack of visual understanding of how inflation and compound interest work.

I will end with a quote taken from the link above:

If you spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, you would have not spent $1 trillion by now...
but ~$700 billion- same amount the banks got during bailout.

Oh, one more quote to end from a 2015 article in Forbes:

Most people think that the big bank bailout was the $700 billion that the treasury department used to save the banks during the financial crash in September of 2008. But this is a long way from the truth because the bailout is still ongoing. The Special Inspector General for TARP summary of the bailout says that the total commitment of government is $16.8 trillion dollars with the $4.6 trillion already paid out._source

So the commitment to the banks for the bailout is the same as the entire US debt in 2013. That is a second pile of hundred dollar notes that is surrounding and towering well over the Statue of Liberty.

I wonder what the banks are going to buy with all of that "free" money?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]