Always Divide by 300 million, 113 million, or 3.5 million

Your out-of-touch Congress always wants to make sure *you* are not in touch with reality, especially when they propose big spending packages. They propose these huge measures such as the stimulus plan and health care reform and they seemingly never bring it down to the individual or family level so you can really understand the impact. To help make things real, you should divide the total cost of a measure by:

300 million - to know the average cost for every man, woman and child in the country.
113 million - to know the average cost per household
3.5 million - to know the cost, on average per household, for measures that are to be paid for by those earning $250,00 or more ($125,000 for single-income).

Here are some of the estimated costs for measures passed or proposed within the past year:

TARP $388,000,000,000
Stimulus $787,000,000,000
Health Care Reform $848,000,000,000

TARP costs approximately $1200 per individual, $3400 per household, and since households earning more than $250,000 pay approximately 47 per cent of all personal income taxes, "rich" households will pay on average about $52,000 each. It remains to be seen what TARP funds will be repaid by the beneficiaries.

Obviously the numbers are bigger for the stimulus package but you can do the math on that one.

Let's take a look at health care reform, which is supposed to be paid for by the "rich" households. Dividing by 3.5 million "rich" households gives an average per-household cost of about $240,000 - pretty staggering even if the cost is spread over 10 years.

Now, if you add up all the "biggies" including Cap & Trade, which is estimated to cost $1600 per household, the totals come out something like this:

Per Individual: $6,600
Per Household: $19,500
Per "Rich" Household: $400,000

We better start saving now so we will have the money to pay this off. Oh wait, if we don't spend anything how is the economy going to recover ? Oh, and did you want to save for a down payment on a house too ? Sorry, you'll have to wait about 10 years.

As an additional note, let's look at the estimated cost of the Afghanistan "surge" - $54,000,000,000 per year.

Per individual: $170 per year
Per household: $470 per year
Per "rich" household: $7200 per year

Given that failure to get a decisive win in Afghanistan could seriously hamper any of the future grandiose domestic plans, this should give some perspective to the numbers. My view is that trying to win a war in such a complicated situation as Afghanistan is grandiose enough without trying to do everything else at the same time. Trying to relieve two decades of pent-up political frustrations all in two years (before elections close the door again) is not the thing to do when our country is fighting a complicated war.