The Stimulus: Calculating the costs

Can anyone imagine a trillion dollars? Remember when you could barely picture what a million bucks would look like? Hard to envision, right? Geraghty the Indispensable and others in the 'Sphere have calculated the cost of the Pork-A-Palooza, and it's not a pretty picture. (HT to Joe Gringo). From Geraghty:

Twice today, CNN has done short segments on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's declaration that

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."

Both times they said the claim checked out, the second time with a famous mathematician (although I think they just needed a calculator).

Christ's birth in year zero one, times 365, times 2009, gets you 733,285,000,000, or a bit over $733 billion. (Yes, I'm leaving out leap years.) You're not even three-quarters of the way there. (Politifact calculates from 4 B.C.)

Yes, the stimulus is less than a trillion—$819 billion in the version passed by the House. But that's still a bigger total than a million a day since the first Christmas.

That's a soundbite that is going to resonate.

Chew on that one Harry Reid.

Publius II