Most people can't picture a million very well either. Pick up a magazine with about 200 pages in it, or two 100 page magazines. Find a page with mostly print.

A typical magazine will have have 5,000 characters on it, if you include the periods, commas, etc. (Multiply the characters in one row by the number of rows if you want to be sure).

Consider that 5,000 dots x 200 pages = 1,000,000 (1 million) dots. Hold the magazine in your hand and ponder the number of characters. Convert each one in your mind to a dollar bill. There's your million dollars.

Now for each dot, picture a thousand dollars. That's a billion. (A thousand million, or a million with three more zeros: 1,000,000,000).

But this article mentions a trillion. Now we're talking a thousand billion, or a one with nine zeroes: 1,000,000,000,000. That's how much, in dollars, our country has spent to kill, maim, terrorize, and mutilate our fellow humans halfway around the world.

These mental images have helped explain many things to myself and also to sixth graders, when contemplating the span of life on earth (4.6 billion years), the age of the universe (around 13 billion years), number of people on earth ((650 billion, last I heard), Bill Gates fortune (up to $90 billion), distance to the sun (93 million miles), and so on.

The images break down in astronomy, with the nearest star system, Alpha Centuri, being 4 light years away (the time it takes light, travelling 186,000 miles per second, to reach us). A million light years is considered relatively close, as these things go.

by Daniel Geery (26 articles, 95 quicklinks, 126 diaries, 912 comments [27 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 8:18:56 AM

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How ironic, in light of the collapse of the  Minneapolis bridge yesterday! The bridge had been rated as structurally unsound a few years ago, but evidently there were no funds to "fix" the problem. Now, disaster has struck. The cost of the Iraqi imperialistic venture will cost over one trillion dollars. And yet, and yet....We will face more calamaties of this nature unless our priorities are redirected to repairing roads, bridges, water-sewer systems. And redirecting those priorities will require that the "criminal" upward redistribution of wealth that has occured in this country since the hey day of St. Ronald be undone--with a vengeance. The cost of empire is, indeed, high.

by Tom Sciamanna (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 25 comments) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 8:31:48 AM

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Great article. I felt the need to write a part II.

 John 

by John R Moffett (89 articles, 18 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 697 comments [14 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 9:51:16 AM

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I've heard about our impending infrastructure problems for about 15 years now. The Democrat and Bill Clinton didn't put money into it either. The real fault here lies with the American people that pay no attention to what politicians are doing with OUR money. How about, for instance, less money for Congressional raises and more for other things. And that's just a small sample.

by Peggy McCann (18 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 34 comments) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 1:20:26 PM

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is literally killing us.

This is from my view as a frustrated Minnesotan who has watched the transportation funding fight for years.

Gov. Pawlenty can't dodge ownership in bridge collapse

by Kathlyn Stone (46 articles, 227 quicklinks, 27 diaries, 690 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 2:27:03 PM

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The Grover Norquist, neo-con conception of government is that it is something which needs to be made non-functional and useless. The reason for their assault on government is that they want you to distrust and hate government so much, that you are willing to privatize everything. Today on CNBC they were talking all day about how we need to privatize the highway system (toll roads everywhere) in order to fix this problem. They failed to mention how government funding has been diverted elsewhere, like Iraq, for the last 5 years. They failed to mention how massive government debt, rung up by the Republicans, is making it harder to fund anything anymore.

by John R Moffett (89 articles, 18 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 697 comments [14 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 4:20:53 PM

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the spotlight on the distinction between who's paying for all these things, and who's profiting from them. For instance, all US taxpayers pay for the Iraq war. The defense contractors & oil corps reap a bonanza from it. So essentially, it's a transfer of wealth from most of the population, to profiteers of the military-industrial complex (MIC).

Infrastructure repair would benefit a far larger section of the US population, but would not be nearly so profitable, for those at the top of the feeding chain -- who are coziest with both parties in Washington.

You're right that "...government debt, created by these tax cuts, is going to cost taxpayers trillions of dollars in future interest payments. Government services will be cut. As a result, public needs will not be met." // But again, this is little problem for the wealthy, who don't much need govt services, & will invest in government debt. On balance, this condition will actually be beneficial to them.

2) Finally, your attempt to blame all this on "Republicans" is ludicrous & intellectually dishonest. The Dems have gone along with every bit of this stuff, from the tax cuts to the war. Furthermore, they've prevented the public from grasping the real nature of the process. They're too gutless to say publicly that it's an immense wealth transfer from the populace to the MIC & oil corps, because they themselves have been bought by the MIC & oil corps.

I challenge you to point to a single statement from a leading Democrat, that calls for an urgent downsizing of the MIC. The Dems are 100% complicit in having helped the MIC to become the out-of-control monster it now is. In fact, the Dems have been no worse about this over time than the Republicans, despite the more blatant public warmongering of Republicans in recent decades.

by Richard Mynick (2 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1552 comments [255 recommended, 5 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 3:23:49 PM

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I asked because I was wondering.  This article has so many glaring deficiencies that I hardly know where to start.  But I'll start with your second statement to wit: "We all can see the results in the case of Iraq."  This is so obviously false as to be ridiculous.  While I would agree we can see the immediate consequences, no one can see the results.  We simply do not know what is going to happen there.  That many on the Left wish for a complete failure of the current policy is without doubt.  Whether we should have gone into Iraq is an acedemic exercise of small import.  What should be done now is the real question.

A little farther along in the piece you say, "The cost of the Iraq War would have largely met these essential needs."  This may be largely true but it begs the question of whether the absence of the war would have resulted in spending on such a massive scale to repair infrastructure.  The obvious answer is no.  The Dems as much as the Repubs use pork to build new monuments to themselves.  They are uninterested in maintaining the old monuments to someone else.  You can posit that spending the money here would have prevented whatever it is you wish to posit it would have prevented but most of the money simply would not have been spent at all and most that was spent would not have gone to infrastructure improvement and repair.  Surely you cannot believe otherwise.  This simply shows that the Dems don't so much dislike the deficit as much as they dislike what the money was spent on.  If the trillion or so dollars spent on Iraq were, instead, spent on social programs not one peep would be heard from the Dems about the deficit.  But I digress.

You then go on to say, "The government debt, created by these tax cuts..."  Government debt is not created by tax cuts.  It is created by government spending.  Spending, by the way, which grows year after year no matter who is in charge.

Then we have to touch on the holy grail of the Left:  socialized medic... I mean, universal healthcare.  You said, "The government revenues lost as a result of tax cuts for the Super Wealthy would have largely paid for universal, single-payer health care."  This shows once again that the argument really isn't about access to health care or the affordability of health insurance.  It's simply about getting someone else to pay for it.  After all, the "Super Wealthy" can afford to pay for my health care more the I.

I didn't believe I would have to wait long before someone blamed the bridge collapse on Bush.  You didn't disappoint.

by Joe Reeser (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 62 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 4:40:35 PM

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The lack of funds generally across the nation is a direct consequence of the long-standing military industrial complex's emphasis upon having uber weapons and the mighty military to enforce Corpo-gov's aspirations for global hegemony. Everything for war (except for what the banking folks rake off). Virtually nothing for people. 

by richard (0 articles, 5 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 1359 comments [400 recommended, 8 rejected]) on Thursday, Aug 2, 2007 at 8:03:52 PM

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