ACTION ALERT: Biden Plans to Increase Pentagon Spending!
Win Without War & Steven Kurutz / The New York Times
(April 9, 2021) — The White House released its plans for the Pentagon budget and it is not cutting spending — it’s increasing it. When Trump entered office, we expected his priorities to increase the Pentagon budget. Now, President Biden has the audacity to raise it further despite the turmoil we have faced in the last year.
What we know is that we are spending a whopping three-quarters of a trillion dollars on wars, weapons, and militarism. To put that in perspective: if you spent $40 every second, it would take you 792.5yearsto go broke if you had a trillion dollars [1]. In the last year, we have faced horrendous forest fires on our West Coast, storms that have demonstrated to us how fragile our infrastructure is in the South, millions of people across the country losing their jobs and all sense of security, and the passing of 560,000 people in the states due to COVID-19.
Three-quarters of a TRILLION dollars would save lives. We have a rare window of opportunity to demand a cut to the bloated Pentagon budget. All we have to do is contact our Members in the House of Representatives to be vocal NOW!
ACTION: Write to your Representative and request that Pentagon spending be cut and the money saved redirected into our communities.
The Pentagon budget amounts to over half of our annual U.S. so-called ‘discretionary’ funds — meaning the money Congress appropriates every year. And that money has been thrown in the gutter with failed billion-dollar programs, such as the Comanche helicopter, the 40-ton Crusader artillery gun, and the infamous F-35 fighter jet which currently costs $36,000 per hour, and it has a projected lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion — the same amount of money that would eliminate all student debt.
The Pentagon is wasting our money. And that’s why we need to stop the war business in its tracks — starting with this year’s Pentagon budget. While we begin this Herculean task of moving forward from the worst economic crisis in over a century, our Representatives need to hear loud and clear that their constituents don’t want more money for war.
The stakes are just too high — your Congressmember needs to hear loud and clear from constituents that our future needs Congressional champions and allies to fight for us and demand that we cut the Pentagon budget.
Take a moment to pause and imagine what the world would look like if our spending priorities weren’t on war. We can choose to fight for that today so those dreams become our reality.
How Many Is a Trillion?
We hear about trillions all the time now, but the number is beyond human comprehension
Steven Kurutz / The New York Times
(April 6, 2021) — Last year, as the rich grew richer while the poor grew only in number, speculation began about who would become the first trillionaire. (Jeff Bezos was the clear front-runner.)
It was a big moment for the word “trillion,” which came into full flower over the past year, mostly as a number that gets thrown around with casual disregard for all those zeros (12) — particularly in the United States when talking about stimulus dollars or the budget deficit or the national debt or the four trillion-dollar companies of the tech industry.
But by the end of 2020, when Congress passed a second round of stimulus just shy of $1 trillion, at $900 billion, the amount had become, eh, whatever. Many economists and a good portion of the public believed a trillion wasn’t enough. (Not the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial desk, which recently characterized the move as that of a, “spendthrift nation, a trillion here, a trillion there.”)
Before the pandemic, “trillion” was a word more commonly uttered by astrophysicists and obscure central bankers, not everyday Americans. That it has gained such widespread usage during a period of staggering unemployment and economic ruin is but one oddity of our moment.
And while it may be a number the public has become accustomed to, it’s also a number beyond all human comprehension. How to visualize a trillion? It’s not like visualizing a million. It’s not even like visualizing a billion.
Jerry Pacheco, a columnist for The Albuquerque Journal, recently put the figure in context. “If you spent $40 per second, around the clock, it would take you 289 days to exhaust a billion dollars,” he wrote. “If you did the same thing with a trillion dollars, it would take you 792.5 years to go broke.”
Put another way, Mr. Pacheco explained, a trillion dollars laid end to end “would stretch for 96,906,656 miles, a distance farther than the sun.”
Of course, that comparison may not be much help for the human brain, which can have a hard time grasping gigantic numbers with which mere mortals largely lack direct experience. As Scientific American put it a few years ago: “Citizens emotionally undeterred by billions and trillions are nonetheless likely to be ill-equipped for meaningful analysis.” You get weird cognitive dissonances. Hear $3 trillion enough times and $2 billion may start to sound puny.
Those of a certain age will remember when “million” was the numerical measure for a whopping figure. “So-and-so is a millionaire,” you might whisper. There were songs like “The Millionaire” by Dr. Hook, movies like “Brewster’s Millions” (based on a 1902 novel of the same name), million-man marches, sweepstakes promoting the idea of instantly becoming one, a long-running hit game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
That show debuted in 1999. But it was around the turn of the new century, and concurrent with the rise of Silicon Valley fortunes, when a few zeros got added in the popular imagination. Billionreplaced million as the impossibly large yet routinely cited number.
Imagine bestowing a TV show with the title “Billions” in 1986 or 1996 — it would have seemed hubristic if not wholly fictional. By 2016, when “Billions” debuted on Showtime, it captured the zeitgeist. Forbes called the 2010s “A Decade of Billionaires,” and indeed, so many were minted in those years that the count nearly doubled between 2008 and 2020. There are 2,095 billionaires today, according to the publication.
Unless you were a Wall Street quant, however, trillion had long felt remote. It was like gazillion: a joke number. “The Trillionaire Next Door” is what Andy Borowitz, the humorist, titled his spoof 2000 book about day trading. In a radio appearance at the time, Mr. Borowitz said he wrote it because, “People aim too low. I mean, a millionaire? Please.”
That same year — 2000 — the word “trillion” appeared in The New York Times 856 times.
In the first three months of 2021, “trillion” has already appeared in this paper 723 times.
Much of that usage is in reference to the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that Congress passed in March. (Too much? Too little? The debate goes on). Faster than you could say, er, “1 followed by 12 zeros,” the Biden administration had already turned its attention to an infrastructure bill it hopes to pass later this year. The amount? $2.2 trillion.
Indeed, it’s not just money. The United Nations Environmental Program’s worldwide tree-planting movement, nicknamed the “billion tree campaign” when it started in 2006, has become the trillion-tree campaign. Some artificial intelligence executives are planning for a future of trillions of internet-connected devices. And scientists are already talking about Brood X, a colony of cicadas that will emerge from their 17-year hibernation to flood the United States this spring.
What’s the high end for the number of cicadas we can expect? One guess.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
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