Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those
who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
-- John F. Kennedy

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Massive dose of dumb

The Jesus Party, formerly known as the Party of NO, which was formerly known as the GOP, came out with a set of talking-points a couple of weeks ago that used the life of Jesus as a comparative measure for how massive the Stimulus Package was. Their implication was that $700+ billion is a lot of money. Wow, who knew? But when you look at their comparison, and then the cold,hard, numbers of the American economy, you see how absolutely stupid their reasoning (I use that term loosely) is. Via Pandagon.net:

BIGGER THAN JESUS

Apparently, the new Republican line on the stimulus is this:

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.”

Now, there’s a bit about this that renders it disingenuous...which is the whole thing. The American economy is massive - $14.28 trillion, in fact. If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you wouldn’t reach the size of the American economy by the year 10,000. Or 20,000. This is why we don’t measure the size of our economy in Jesus Money, despite the declaration of such in the RNC platform.

To put this in further context - over the course of Jesus’ life, at $1 million a day, and presuming his death at the age of 33 (including leap years), the value of Jesus’ life would have been $12.053 billion.

Microsoft’s yearly revenue last year was $60 billion, meaning they earned five Jesuses in a year.

Circuit City’s yearly revenue in 2006 was $10.4 billion, meaning even a failed company was, less than three years ago, earning nearly a full Jesus.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest everything, earned $404 billion last year, meaning that they earned a whopping thirty-three and a third Jesuses in a single year.

The American economy, incidentally, is nearly 1200 Jesuses strong, which is nearly the size of Chatom, AL...all full of Jesuses.

This teaches us two things: the first is that the American economy is massive, and any effort to stimulate it will require a suitably large amount of money. The second part is that it’s really stupid to measure things by the yardstick of Jesus earning a million dollars a day.

Also, nobody has any idea how many days of Jesus it would take to keep Pajamas Media afloat, but it’s probably more than you’d think.


They have no ideas! And they don't seem to get the concept of "economic stimulus" ... or put it another way, SPENDING!
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