That’s My Money You’re Talking About!

According to the current issue of TIME, $1 trillion would enable “the Treasury to give $3272.57 to every man, woman and child in the U.S.” I take this general statement to mean that there would be no conditions of having reached the age of majority or citizenship. At any rate, such a distribution would amount to $6545.14 for Mary and me. We might use such an econmic stimulus to make the down payment on a new car (although I don’t think we’re prepared to buy American), to pay down our mortgage by a bit, or to eliminate our indebtedness (excluding the car and mortgage). We might even put it in savings to help offset what Wall Street has done to our retirement funds. The point is we could choose to do any number of productive things with our money. It fascinates me how we have come to make a distinction between the government’s money and our money. In fact, they are one and the same, and it really seems that we should have some say in how $1 trillion dollars of our money is going to be disbursed. Frankly, I’m not too crazy about the idea of bailing out the American auto industry because of its gross negligence toward the environment and the expensively poor quality of its product. I don’t really want to reward the greed of Wall Street by bailing out the financial sector which is callously indifferent to the future of ordinary people. Nope, if our government somehow has a trillion dollars to give away (also in the TIME article is this example: A stack of $100 bills worth $1 trillion would rise 789 miles—equal to 144 Mount Everests end over end) I want my $3272.57 back so that I can personally spend it as I choose.