Random Thoughts

One of my web sites that I frequently read relating to politics is PolitiFact.com.  It serves to remind me that what politicians say has to be taken with, not a grain of salt, but a barge load of salt.  I was reading it the other day and saw this 100{f21b2e9c886449ccfd883f06fb77471a0806c5f3cb16ac6af4e8bda5ea93c311} truthful statement from President Obama:

President Barack Obama says, “Exxon pocketed nearly $4.7 million every hour”

This was talking about 2011. Now I found this interesting, so I wondered, in comparison how much did the US spend per hour in 2011.  So I googled and found this site: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/.  According to them, government spending in 2011 amounted to 6.1 trillion dollars.  So dividing 6.1 trillion by 365 days per year, then by 24 hours per day gives the hourly spending rate during 2011 of approximately 696 million dollars per hour. Hmmm, perspective is an interesting thing.  It seems to me that this country has more of a spending problem than a revenue problem. Now if you take the current US population according to the Census bureau (2011) as 311,591,917, then if everyone paid their fair share (fair being defined as equal in this case) then it is only (approximately) 2.23 dollars per hour (696 million dollars divided by 311 million people) or about 52 dollars a day every man, woman and child needs to pony up.  That’s about 19.5 thousand per year.