The Seven Percent Solution

Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2008 - 12:01 a.m.

Nano our business: We found the proper connecty-doozy at the Apple Store last night, and luckily, it's backwards compatible.

So, I hooked up John's new Nano to the computer and muttered the required incantations and it is updated and synched up now and all should be well.

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Now then, some money talk.

The stock market loss in the US markets on Monday does not constitute a depression, or a recession. 777 points is only seven percent of the total market.

Meaning, every dollar invested before the drop became worth an average of ninety-three cents. That won't affect the majority of us in a negative way at all.

Most of all, be grateful that the bailout bill didn't pass.

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I've been monkeying around with some bailout numbers here, and I'd like to share with the class.

Special thanks to Toren Smith who railed off the alarming calculations to John, who came home and told them to me so he could watch the expression on my face.

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Here's what nearly happened, folks:

For simplicity's sake, let's presume the bailout would have been right around seven hundred billion US dollars:

700,000,000,000. ( the short scale definition of 'billion' )

With that number in mind, here's a timeline for paying it back:

if there are 365.25 days in a year, and we calculate that there are 86,400 seconds in each full day, we then get this figure:

365.25 x 86,400 = 31,557,600 seconds in a calendar year.

Now, let's look what happens when you divide the bailout amount by the number of seconds in a calendar year:

700,000,000,000 / 31,557,600 = 22,181.66147. This final number is the amount of years' worth of seconds that are in the bailout.

In other words, if the bailout were paid back to the government at the rate of one dollar per second, the debt would finally be paid off in a little over twenty-two thousand years. And if we add some zeros to the amount per second, it still stays ugly. A thousand dollars a second would pay the debt in only twenty-two years.

Wow. A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there and pretty soon we're talking some real money.

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Ugh. Math. And I'm doing it at night, too. Pweh. I'm solar powered.

I think that's it. Have a nice Tuesday.

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