Alright. First of all this is going to sound so much like a chain-letter. Rest assured, it is not. I've sat at this olive themed screen typing this up in person.

You've heard of politicians spouting off "We need $5.7 billion for so and so project!" We readily lap it up because supposed said project is for a greater good but we give no consideration to the cost. We have no concept of a billion. It's a hard number to picture. Well I'm going to help with that a little. And yes, I tried my best to ensure accurate calculations. If I've ****ed up, let me know. I've done mostly everything in metric since it makes calculating easier. I've done some conversions. Let's break down 10[sup]9[/sup] shall we.

Before we begin, a quick intro to scientific notation (I make some use of it). If I say something like 1.21x10[sup]9[/sup] W I mean 1,210,000,000 W or 1.21 GW. Move the decimal point to the right, subtract the power and vice-versa.

Dollar bills are 15.5 cm x 6.5 cm.

$10[sup]9[/sup] laid end to end length-wise is 96,100 mi that is about three times around the Earth at the equator plus 3,486.21 additional miles.

1 mile of dollar bills laid end to end length-wise is $10,383. To have a wall of $10[sup]9[/sup] with length being 1 mi, you would have a wall of dollars 1 mi x 3.88 mi. In Terms of "football fields" (what an odd unit of measure) it would be 17.6 x 68.29 football fields.

I make $47,500/y. To reach $1,000,000,000 I need to work 21,052y and keep EVERY SINGLE penny that I've earned. Conversely it would take an entire town of 21,052 strong earning $47,500, the combined income would make $1 billion

Let's assume a person works from the age of 22 to the retirement age of 65. That's 43 years. To earn $1,000,000,000 in that time, one needs to have a salary of $23,255,813.95 keeping every penny. In the same amount of time, I will only have earned $2,042,500 at the same salary and keeping every dollar. This is of course also assuming inflation is stagnant.

Not necessarily monitary related...

Light would take about 5,400 seconds or 1.5 hours to reach 10[sup]9[/sup] mi. Light travels at about 3.0x10[sup]8[/sup] m/s or ~ 186,411.36 mi/s. The fastest man made object is only able to go 67,054 m/s (41.66 mi/s)

10[sup]9[/sup] s = 31.6885y. My birthday is 20 November 1981 @ 6 PM on the dot (so says my birth cert.). I will be 1 Gs old on 29 July 2013 at around 6 PM.

Assume the world has exactly 1 billion people. Using 2006 estimate of population of 2,941,454 of San Diego county, if every man, woman, and child were to keel over instantaneously the total world population would drop by only 0.29%

Again, if I've miscalculated, please correct. But I hope my thread has inspired people to think "do they really need all that money?"

Hey imagine a country with say 300 million people who each make $40,000 per year on average, then maybe their total tax is sat at around 30% (in my municipality income tax is 30%, there's also value added tax, gas tax etc. so in my country it'd be more), which gives us a yearly tax income of 3600 billion dollars.

Now, this isn't the only tax money the government, local or otherwise, makes in tax money as there's also taxes on businessess and companies etc.

That billion doesn't seem like that much now does it?



Also what kind of project costs $5,7 billion dollars? An invasion of a foreign country?

Kind of what I'm getting at. Imagine if people actually realized the cost and had some perspective (like I should have had). People might have not voted to invade! And the United States could have better spent its money elsewhere.

No, that costs 3 trillion.

$3 trillion, plus funding social and civic programs on borrowed money, minus large tax cuts for the largest contributors.

If the top 1% of the population controls 80% of the money, shouldn't that mean the top 1% should pay 80% of the taxes? You might say that it would be socialism, but taxes are socialist to begin with. Taxing a multi-billionaire 30% hurts them a lot less than it hurts someone who works minimum wage - the 30% will not affect the wellbeing (survivial) of the billionaire but it could very well mean the minimum wage earner can't afford this month's ramen.

If the top 1% contributes 80% of the taxes, what happens when you cut taxes for the top 1%? A pat on the back from your cronies and then who's making up the difference? If you eliminate taxes for the richest 1% there would not be enough money to make up the difference, even if you taxed the remainder 100%.

JG, all I can say is I'm glad you don't live in Zimbabwe currently. At the moment they have 10 million percent inflation. The government just unveiled a new 100 billion dollar bill. It's barely enough to buy a loaf of bread.

source

What's the reasoning behind giving more and more tax breaks to the rich?

I'm firmly conservative, and I believe that a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow. However, I don't understand why the wealthy are given more breaks than anyone else. Shouldn't there at least be a flat tax rate for everybody?

Edit: The only response I've ever gotten is that the rich spend more money than anyone else, which I don't think makes the situation any more sensible.

The wealthy pay a larger percent of their income as tax than anyone else in the country, and not only that, but the top 20% of wage earners in this country are the only group who's share of the overall tax burden has consistenly increased over the last 20 years, while the lower 80% has all dropped. I'd hardly call that them getting a tax break.

Source.

Check the link on that page about share of taxes to get a breakdown over the last 20 years or so.

Hmm. Then why does everyone believe the rich get loads of tax breaks?

That's all I ever seem to hear, especially when in school.

Because its trendy to blame the rich for the woes of the country, because they have lots of money and should give it all to benefit the rest of us.

I can dig that.


That's for the info, for realz.

I'm not talking about wage earners, I'm talking about capital ownership.

"Wage earners" are still middle-class.

Heh, well maybe I'm not totally wrong.

I guess it depends on how you define middle class. The top 1 percentile on those reports has a minimum income of well over $300,000. Not exactly poor middle class people there. Or even upper middle class.

I guess I should also point out that thats minimum number that the government set to be in that percentile, not the average wage of them. If we were to take the average wage of the top 1 percentile, it would be much higher then $300,000.

ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS?!!

ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE GIGAWATTS??!!!

Really what effed us so bad economicially was 9/11. Its just taken this long to really feel the reprocussions from what happened.

I think the issue here is the fact that you keep calling 'annual income' or 'salary' a wage. $300,000 a year is (upper, upper) middle-class by the way - there's a huge gulf between the mega-billionaires and everybody else and that enormous chasm is what makes someone upper-class. Call it the inflation of the quality of life.

Like I said before though, there are a certain number of bare essentials that are required to sustain life and, proportionally speaking, someone with a higher income can afford it. Someone who makes $300,000 and has to give 65% of his money over to the government is still eating lobster dinner every Sunday, while a waitress who has to give up 15% might not have any canned beans left to eat come Thursday before payday.

And I'm still talking about capital ownership. Stock owners (but not necessarily accountants). The MBA crowd in general - like, the ones with real jobs not the ones with an honorary degree in Microsoft Excel. The system is not designed to account for people whose primary income is from capital gains, and Bush's tax cuts (which specifically included capital gains tax breaks) are stacked in the favor of the oil magnate crowd.

Not really. The current situation is a combination of crippling fiscal irresponsibility on the parts of average Americans, the banks and the federal government, as well as a natural downturn after the United States was riding high on the IT boom in the 90s.

Probably the only reason your economy wasn't hit by a proverbial nuke is because the Chinese bought your debt and have been whittling away at the value of the US dollar, which is making American industry and labor competitive against other countries for the first time in forever.

9/11 was a temporary decrease in base consumerism and really ended up not meaning a lot to people who weren't looking for an excuse to bomb brown people before it happened. Well, you know. Apart from people who live in New York or had family die.

Wow.

The Hoover Dam cost $676 million in today's monetary value, and Taipei 101 cost 1,76 billion dollars.

A single B-2 bomber costs around $2 billion accounting for development and maintenance costs.

When did we vote to invade?

I laugh at you short-scale countries.

Dude.....jiggawats

Get your Doc Brown straight!

I heard somewhere that the top 20 parasitic diseases in the world could be cured with the funding that the US military gets to stay in Iraq for two or three days. Go figure.

Of course, realize that predicting medical breakthroughs solely with the metric of money is a tenuous prediction.

Great Scott you're right!

At work we have a client right now that wants forms on their website to be saved in an Excel "database." :downs:

*plays Back to the future soundtrack"

I hate money, cos i have none.

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  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

The theory is that rich people with more money will use that money to invest in new technologies, build businesses, buy expensive luxury items and in general put it back into the system in a way that benefits other people and keeps the flow moving. It says this is a far better way to help the poor than by government programs because the rich won't give handouts, but will instead provide jobs and a steady source of income while keeping money circulating. Also, when you reduce income tax on the rich, you increase tax revenue in other areas such as capital gains, sales, which may end up more than making up for the difference.

What I see as the most important effective difference between this and a socialist system is this will have economic highs and lows while a socialist system stunts and stagnates the economy because there is not enough wealth moving around.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt though. I'm one of those nut jobs that wants to repeal the income tax.