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Title: Congressional spending arithmetic

Original CoS Document (slug): [[https://conventionofstates.com/congressional-spending-arithmetic|congressional-spending-arithmetic]]

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Created: 2021-03-01 13:02:13

Updated: 2025-02-18 23:50:58

Published: 2021-03-01 00:00:00

Converted: 2025-04-14T21:10:01.127814737


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I’m old enough to remember when $1 billion was an incomprehensibly large amount of money. Now, Congress casually tosses around proposals to spend trillions of dollars. \\
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Just to clarify:

  * $1 billion looks like this: $1,000,000,000.00. That’s 1,000 million. You are looking at nine zeros.
  * $1 trillion looks like this: $1,000,000,000,000.00. That is 1,000 billion or 1,000,000 million. One million million dollars. Those are 12 zeros.

Try getting that out of your local bank ATM. You can’t.\\
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But you can get it out of the U.S. Treasury or the Federal Reserve, if you are clever enough.\\
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{{https://content.conventionofstates.com/cosaction-prod/public/content/images/36353/36353_original.jpg?1200x800|covid money $1.9 trillion for Covid-19...and what else?}}

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How much money can Congress extract from the We the People's ATM? Seemingly a whole bunch. It works like this.

  - Identify a crisis. Right now it’s Covid-19.
  - Promise to fix the crisis by throwing money at it. Right now, Congress has decided that $1.9 trillion is the magic number ($1,900,000,000,000). Of that, you will get $2,400.00, give or take.
  - Spend the rest on whatever the heck else you can dream up.
  - Rinse and Repeat.

Well, does that not seem so helpful? Everybody gets $2,400. Yes, ain’t it great! If 180 million adults each get $2,400 checks, how much is left of the $1.9 trillion?\\
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180,000,000 x 2,400 = $432,000,000,000\\
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That is only $432 billion.\\
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So, how much is left? \\
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1,900,000,000,000 - 432,000,000,000 = $1,468,000,000,000\\
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That leaves $1.47 trillion to be spent elsewhere. \\
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But where?\\
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And on what?\\
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Why don’t we get our full share of the entire $1.9 trillion? That would be $10,555.56 each.\\
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Where is $8,155.56 of my $10,555.56 going?\\
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Congress is made up of clever lawyers: staffers, representatives, and senators—most of them lawyers. Congress is made up of a horde of lawyers who are smart enough to realize that math is not their strong suit. So they ignore math.\\
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You get $2,400, while they give away $8,155.56 to the folks who paid to get them elected.\\
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Do we have this money? No. The politicians are borrowing it,supposedly on our behalf. Except, we’re not getting very much of it, are we? Yet we have to pay it back.\\
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Not us, technically. Rather, our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids will have the privilege of paying it all back. \\
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How is that for some new math? It's great for the politicians and their friends, the parasites who feed on us. Perhaps those lawyer-politicians are better with numbers than we realize.\\
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We are governed by a kleptocracy that has lost all sense of proportion. In broad daylight, the entitled elites have flung open the door to the national vault and are simply stuffing cash in their friends’ pockets as fast as their grubby hands possibly can move. All sense of restraint is gone. It’s just a feeding frenzy that can’t end well.\\
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This is why we urgently need a Convention of States to add an amendment to the Constitution that forces the federal government to live within its means. Twenty-eight trillion dollars of federal debt says the federal government is living beyond its means.\\
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It’s well beyond time to stop the insanity. It’s going to take everyone of us to say, “No more!” The place to organize to stop the spending is here. Volunteer or contribute, but do something today!

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