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Opinion Letters Letters and comments for December 3, 2008
Letters and comments for December 3, 2008
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Dutto, Hilyard Faulty math, but $7,500 would still be nice To the Editor: The letter from the Elgin mayor contained faulty math. If you take $750,000,000,000 and divide by 100,000,000 people you get $7,500 per person. That is assuming that there are around 100 million adult taxpayers. The only way to get $2 million per person is if there is only 375,000 people who get the money, which I guess could happen as part of a lottery. The numbers quoted in the letter are from a miscalculated e-mail that is floating around. Don’t want to get everyone’s hopes up too much. Although that $7,500 would still be pretty nice! Darren Dutto La Grande
To the Editor: While Mayor Gentry’s heart was in the right place with her plan, it does have one flaw. There are 1,000 millions in 1 billion, not 1,000,000. Giving $2 million to each American citizen would be $700 trillion, not $700 billion. Perhaps a plan involving a gift of $2,000 to each citizen would be workable, but this does not seem to be enough to solve the problem, given that this amount would not nearly be enough to stave off the collapse of the banking or auto industries, both of which would essentially destroy our economy if they failed. Some form of economic stimulus is necessary, yes, but we have to keep in mind just how horrible Americans overall are with finances. The current average saving rate is -0.7 percent — yes, that’s a negative number. The average American household spends 0.7 percent more than they make a year. Even beyond that, the amount of debt currently held in total by the credit industry is somewhere on the order of $100 trillion, which is approximately two to three times greater than the world’s GDP. To restate: The credit industry currently holds more debt than the total amount of money and value that exists in the entire world. As I said earlier, a stimulus of some kind is definitely needed, as spending can only help the economy when it’s in a state like this. Not spending beyond one’s means, which only hurts things, but spending in a reasonable fashion. Americans as a whole need to become much more intelligent about their finances, and giving everyone in the country $2 million (problems with math aside) would not help this. Huge amounts of free money only guarantee that the people who receive it will spend it (and probably more) completely frivolously. Justin Hilyard Athena Formerly of La Grande |
