'Illions of Dollars

01/31/2005

'Illions of Dollars

One of my little slogans that I've always wanted to pound into the heads of Democratic politicians is this: "All numbers that end in 'illion' sound the same." When a Republican says "Senator S0-and-so voted to increase taxes by fourteen million dollars," or "Social Security is $4 billion in debt," the fact that back on Capitol Hill, they would call those numbers "asterisks" really doesn't matter.

So I enjoyed this sentence from the Republican battle book on Social Security:

"Your audience doesn't know how trillions and billions differ. They know these numbers are large but not how many billions make a trillion."

(This is probably not because they are confused by the British system, in which one trillion is a million billion, which I didn't really understand until I tried to understand why the Financial Times always writes large numbers as "$4,000 billion.")

On the whole, though, if I were a Republican member of Congress, I don't think I'd feel too comfortable that this book would serve as the magical shield of virtue and sword of truth that would protect me from the political wrath of my constituents. I would be particularly worried by this paragraph:

"Your audience is skeptical of things that sound too perfect or too pat. They will dismiss the notion that the government can help them accumulate a million dollars in a personal account. They do not find it credible that the accounts will be easy to manage."

The playbook, as well packaged as it is, doesn't give that member of Congress much of anything to rebut these rather reasonable skepticisms. (Even under the Cato Institute's Social Security calculator, even a 35-year-old earning $70,000 would only accumulate about $600,000, so I don't know who's going to accumulate millions.)

Posted by Mark Schmitt on 01/31/2005 at 04:41 PM in Decembrist archives | Permalink

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

This thing is a freaking gold mine.

The Dems should announce some kind of 30 Day campaign to highlight one absurd sentence or graf per day.

"The Republican Party thinks it can fool the American people"

"The Republican Party is getting tips on strategy from Lenin"

Or something better than that, preferably.

Every damn day.

Posted by: praktike | 01/31/2005 at 07:28 PM

and of course a billion is a million millions.which makes a trillion a million million million..

Posted by: old ari | 02/01/2005 at 08:59 AM

Why not talk about possibly adding anywhere from 13 to 26% to the existing 7.6 trillion dollar debt to cover monies that are being diverted to these personal savings accounts and not going to today's retirees?

Remember, all unfunded government spending is a tax increase down the road. China owns $500 billion dollars of US debt in the form of treasuries; Japan, $750 billion.

Posted by: Steve | 02/02/2005 at 11:32 AM

Yes, in America 1,000 million is a billion. I believe that a British billion is 10,000 million.

Posted by: Abby | 02/02/2005 at 03:02 PM

Technically a British billion is one million million. But confusingly, that definition is almost never used.

Posted by: Ginger Yellow | 02/10/2005 at 10:50 AM

To solve this problem, Democrats need to start talking numbers ONLY in millions. So a funding shortage of $1.2 billion would now be discussed by Democrats as $1200 million--one THOUSAND two hundred MILLION. This would get specially good when trillions are discussed because here in the US of A, a trillion IS a million million.

So a cost of $2 trillion is now "two MILLION million". That's starting to sound like a lot of money!

Posted by: Scamper | 02/11/2005 at 07:26 PM