Political accounting...

During Tuesday's presidential debate, trillions of dollars were tossed around as if they were mere $100 bills. Yet, for all the discussions going back and forth between the two candidates, no one even mentioned that when they were talking of some $5 trillion unfunded tax cuts, these were on a 10 year period, just like the Simpson-Bowles plan called for $3.8 trillion in spending cuts and $1 trillion in more tax revenue by 2020; yeah, another time frame altogether!

This, of course, is utterly confusing and I doubt that many Americans knew that, yet alone could fathom the difference between billions and trillions of dollars! This mixing apples and oranges and not telling anybody is confusing and has of course become the new “lingua franca” of our politicians.

Without mixing the rest of the basket of fruits, I know that our GDP in 2011 was $15 trillion and is estimated to grow by 1 to 2% in 2012. Yet, at the same time, our federal government's debt now stands at $16.0 trillion; that's right, a tad bigger than our GDP, but don't feel too bad, Japan is twice that compared to their own GDP!

Of course the press is notoriously bad in keeping these numbers into perspective for the public's benefit and someone should, once and for all, call a spade a spade, and provide us a simple yet sobering display of how these number stack up over the next decade or so, so we finally can be reassured that we all sit at the bottom of a deep, deep hole!