Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Roughly $770,000,000,000

I'm not an economist.

I'm not really all that affected right now by the Dow Jones plummet yesterday. I have no credit cards, no car loan, no mortgage, and no stocks.

I have a decent amount of savings, nothing that will keep us going for 10 years, but enough to live on for about a year if we needed to do so.

But I started thinking about this close to $770 billion dollar bailout plan, and how much you could buy for it. Here's some figures I came up with:

- In 2007, the average home price in America was $220,000. With the bailout money, you could by 3,500,000 average price homes.

- The top of the line 2008 Honda Accord, brand new, costs $28,384. That's brand new, no negotiations. You would be able to purchase 27,147,088 top of the line 2008 Honda Accords.

- The average gallon of gas around North Alabama right now is $3.60. It takes 18 gallons to fill up my Accord. That equals $64.80 to fill up my car. Even though I don't, lets say the average person fills their car up once a week (for me its more like once every 2 weeks). That would equal $3369 a year to fill up my car once a week. With the bailout money, I could fill my car up once a week for 228,554,467 years.

- The average cost for milk across the nation is $3.81 a gallon. You could buy 202,099,737,532 gallons.

What other fun numbers can you come up with?

- According to the WFP School Feeding Program, a program that feeds orphans and needy children in Africa, it costs, according to March 2008 prices, $0.25 to feed a child per day. We could feed 308,000,000,000 with the bailout money.

Let's look at this way, as many of you think as well, if I don't pay my bills, I could go to jail. If I don't pay, then I will be punished. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Here's a number for you: I pay right at $3000 to the government every quarter. Why? Because as a minister, I'm technically "Self-employed". You can do the math. $12,000 a year to the federal government for taxes, and that's with all the great benefits we get. Since my wife is self-employed also, we pay close to 40 cents on the dollar to taxes.

Now, i don't like it, but its the law. I pay what the law asks me to pay. However, its hard to make it sometimes when almost HALF of your money goes to pay taxes. There's got to be a better way than what we're doing, especially if my taxes are going to pay for the mistakes of people making millions more dollar a year than I make.

I don't know how I feel about the bailout plan, because of all the mis-directions we're getting on it. How can we trust these guys when they've put us into this position?

Thoughts on the bailout? Thoughts on the fact that they won't meet again until THURSDAY AT NOON??

1 comment:

TARA said...

The taxes are killing us! It's a shame the gov't gets over half of what middle class america makes. Add up the sales tax, and all the extra taxes you pay and its at least half!

People have lost faith in the president, the congress, the senate, and just about everyone because of the lies we've been fed all these years. Nope, I dont' think tax payers should foot the bill for the greed and dishonesty that brought about this crisis.