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Dan Abel

In article >,
(Steve Pope) wrote:

> Leonard Blaisdell > wrote:
>
> > Although the numbers being tossed around now are ridiculous,
> > three hundred million Americans times a million dollars
> > equals $300,000,000,000,000 or three hundred trillion in US
> > parlance. Or I got the math wrong and it's worse. If not,
> > bzzzzzt. We're only into single digit trillion debt, not multi
> > hundred trillion debt so far. Come back next year for relevancy.
>
> There is $5 trillion just in agency debt, the current bailout
> is 12.8 trillion already, and the total on- and off-the-book
> liabilities of the federal government have a present value of
> $60 trillion or so.
>
> Still, you're right that they don't have an extra $300
> trillion to hand out.

All my relatives on my mother's side lived in Germany during and shortly
after WWII (some still live there). A lot of people were mad at
Germany, so they were forced to agree to pay enormous reparations. The
people in Germany were starving. The country was devastated. But there
was no choice, so they paid the reparations. When people went to the
grocery store, they always took a wheelbarrow. Not to carry the
groceries, because nobody could afford enough that they couldn't carry
it. No, it was to carry the money. It took a whole wheelbarrow of
money to buy groceries for one meal. My father was in the US Army in
Berlin at the end of the war. He had no German money and didn't need
any. The unit of currency was cigarettes. He bought a couple of
cameras using cigarettes.

The US government can easily print more money. Paper is cheap. But if
you have a million bucks, and the guy who lives under the bridge has the
same, who's going to sell you anything?

--
Dan Abel
Petaluma, California USA

"[Don't] assume that someone is "broken" just because they behave in ways
you don't like or don't understand." --Miche