Monday, February 16, 2009

If NETT ran the U.S. Treasury Department...

Today we have a very topical guest blog post from Frank KJ! Take a look.


I started pondering a bit about the astronomical size of the stimulus and wrote the little snippet below. You are welcome to post it on the blog if you feel it is appropriate. I just had "fun" (sometimes disgust) playing with the numbers. Frank
$787,000,000,000 is a lot of dough. For that kind of money you could
- Buy Walmart 3 times
- Organize about 50 Olympic Games
- Buy the worth of Niger 200 times - say
- Buy about 1500 Major League Baseball teams
- Pay each person in the US about $2,700
- Hire 12,000 bank and carmaker CEOs and give them each a Gulfstream jet
- Buy 270,000 Super Bowl ads
- Buy 3,400,000 Ferrari F430 Convertible

Now imagine that NETT was in charge of all that green. How would we spend them? For starters we could buy every single person in the US a nice pair of running shoes. That would only cost us about $15 bio. Next, throw in some Darn Tough socks and we are set back another $1.5 bio. (still leaving Big Ben with a nice commission). And of course everybody will get an NETT singlet with the cool new logo – never miss a chance to promote even it cost you about $5 bio. Whew! Still $755 bio to hand out. Some big ticket items would include building and maintain trails across the country, building sidewalks and bike paths, and fixing all those darn pot holes so we run can at night with risking sprained ankles. In the fine print of the bill, NETT would quietly award each member $10 mio. for promoting a healthy life style; surely no one would catch such a tiny little bit of pork. But there is still money left, so how would you spend them?

Just to get a sense how big a number 787,000,000,000 is --say NETT members combined run 100,000 miles in a year. At that rate it would take us 7,87 mio. years to run 800 bio. miles. Even Paul Young better start believing in reincarnation if we want to reach that goal.

These are tough times but like any endurance event hang in tough and as long as you keep moving forward you are getting closer to the goal.

-Frank

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