Correction

It's not my fault.  Really.   I was quoting a CNN article.  But they had a misprint, and today, it's been corrected.   Oops.  I shoulda known better.  AIG's bailout was $170 BILLION and their bonuses were $165 MILLION.  A mere drop in the bucket (I still don't get it, though).  My apologies for my prior faux pas and the violence that I may have inadvertently incited.

All this talk of obscene amounts of money makes me feel as if I am channeling my dad, who was a prominent economist.  I'm remembering one time, some years back, when we were sitting in the family room at my parents house discussing the deficit (actually, he was trying to explain it to me), he was trying to explain the notion (since it is just a notion) of a trillion dollars.  I know that we're not talking about a trillion dollars in relation to AIG, but the national debt is 11 trillion, so it's worth understanding.   I remember he used an analogy of spending a dollar every second, 24 hours a day, since that's something we can all wrap our minds around (kinda).  $60 a minute.  $3600 every hour.  $86,400 every day (you could spend that, right?).  But I don't remember quite how it all worked out, so I found myself this nifty little video on YouTube.  It uses the same example my dad gave, which comforts me somehow, and the narrator talks about economics as if we're  3rd graders, which frankly, when we're talking about this amount of money, I really appreciate.

Talk about something that's hard to get...take a look see.

I know.  It hurts my brain, too.