Who's Counting: Jobs, Health Care, and Twitter

March 7, 2010 — -- As usual, simple arithmetic is crucial to understanding many of the biggest, most important news stories (as well as those, like the Tiger Woods saga, that are of no public significance). What follows is a collage of some of these stories.

One problem is that people often view numbers as providing decoration rather than information. Over the last couple of weeks, for example, I performed a little experiment with people I randomly met.

If our idle conversation turned to current events, I mentioned a headline I claimed to have just read proclaiming, "Experts Fear Annual Housing Costs in the U.S. (Rent, Mortgage Payments) May Top $2 Billion." I followed up with, "Imagine that -- more than 2 billion dollars per year."

People usually responded by bemoaning the mortgage crisis, foreclosures, Wall Street, and a host of other issues. Only one noticed that $2 billion is an absurdly low number. A population of 300 million translates to about 100 million households. Dividing 100 million into $2 billion results in about $20 in rent or mortgage paid annually by the average household. Just $20!

This anecdote is not without relevance for bigger issues such as the various health care proposals. There are different bills under consideration, but each of them has an approximate cost of $1 trillion over 10 years.

Most people realize that a trillion is much, much bigger than a billion, and so assume $1 trillion is an overwhelming fiscal burden. But the price tag for the Iraq war was also about $1 trillion in direct costs and double that in associated collateral costs, not to mention the dead and badly wounded U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. One needn't be a pacifist or "leftist" to believe that health care coverage would be a more beneficial expenditure than the Iraq war was.