By Paul Nachman
02/11/2010
"Innumerate" people are those uncomfortable and/or incompetent with numbers and quantitative concepts — a parallel to "illiterate" people who are unable to handle the written word.
Innumeracy, especially about financial quantities, seems to be a de facto job requirement among journalists [Peter Brimelow says: hey!], judging by how often I read, for example, "$30 million" when only "$30 billion" makes sense — or vice versa — in news articles or, especially, editorials.
(To make everything clear — a million is a thousand thousand: 1,000,000. In the U.S., a billion is a thousand million:1,000,000,000. A trillion is a thousand billion: 1,000,000,000,000. In Britain, by contrast, a billion is a million million, the same as our trillion. I'll stick with the U.S. terms. OK?)
Besides such primitive confusions, I have the impression that reporters' (and many other peoples') brains just lock up when they're dealing with quantities such as "a trillion dollars" or "$1 trillion".
(Nachman side note to journalist: Please DO NOT write "$1 trillion dollars" — a practice that seems to have supplanted using "it’s" for the possessive of "it" as the most common typographical stupidity.)
Of course, $1 trillion as a free-standing quantity is probably not very meaningful to anyone, even Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, each with net worth in the vicinity of $50 billion.
So here’s one way to think about it: If the U.S. federal budget were $1 trillion, and each of us approximately 308 million American residents were on the hook for an equal share of it, it would amount to about $3,250 in taxes per person.
That’s a quantity most adults can relate to.
(In fact, of course, the current [fiscal year 2010] federal budget is about $3.5 trillion. That would be about $11,375 per U.S. resident. Of course, about $1.2 trillion of that is borrowed i.e. punted to the next generation.)
Here’s my point in action: Recently, two articles in the Los Angeles Times credulously quoted from a recent UCLA study about illegal aliens and the American economy.
LA Times staffer Anna Gorman is a retired physicist and immigration sanity activist in Bozeman, MT. Read his VDARE.COM blogs here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.