Economic Stimulus: $1 Million Per Day Since Jesus Christ Falls Short

Spending of $1 Million Per Day Since Christ's Birth Would Come to About $734 Billion

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senate Republican Minority Leader, opens some eyes with a statement that's not open to debate.

Mitch McConnell says, to give the proposed economic stimulus plan some perspective: "If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion."

We could do the math, but politifact.com in care of the St. Petersburg Times did the math for us. Biblical scholars may debate exactly when Jesus Christ was born, but the most common finding is that Jesus Christ was born some wher around 4 B.C. If this is true, then 4 B.C. should be adjusted to 0 B.C. and this would be 2012, which in a screwy way would mean Barack Obama was up for re-election, which would make some people happy, whatever!

So let's stick with Mitch McConnell's math. Take 2012 years times 365 days, then add 513 days for leap years, and you get about $734.5 billion. That's less than an economic stimulus package that could cost anywhere from about $800 billion to $1.2 trillion. But McConnell omits, since Republicans are such friends with Wall Street, that the sum is only slightly higher than the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

Sometimes the numbers numb us. It may have been better if million and billion and trillion didn't rhyme. They make the dollar amounts sound too much alike. For example, $100 million to the ear sounds like way more than $1 billion, whereas actually $100 million is only 10 percent of $1 billion. Then we get into trillions, such as this year's $1.2 trillion budget deficit and the overall $11.7 trillion budget debt, and we don't quite realize that $1 trillion is actually $1,000,000,000,000, or $1,000,000 million, or $1 million million. There are many ways of looking at it.