Trillions

First published in Column 8 on the 12^th February, 1992

We used to have a discussion in our house (of the more heated sort) in which my son insisted there was such a figure as a centillion. He was right: the centillion is one of those numbers that needs hundreds of noughts to make its presence felt.

However, who needs centillions, when the mere fact of a trillion is enough to make me want to sit down, my legs all atremble. I read that the United States is 3.8 of these (and probably more) in debt. $3.8 trillion! That makes our balance of payments problems look quite piffling, doesn’t it?

A trillion is a million million in the States – their billion is only one thousand million, so I’m informed. Only. No wonder their debt goes up faster than everybody else’s. (If you’re in the UK and they start talking about debts of £3.8 trillion, run for cover: Over there a trillion is a million million million, or a number trailing 18 zeros.)

All this exposition of erudition (that is, showing off), is merely leading up to sharing some figures I came across recently. If you thought that the arguments last year over ministerial flowers and MPs’ lounge suites were either the height of trivia or pettiness, then take a gecko at some of the nonsense that’s helped put the US federal spending into trillions of debt.

I take these figures from a book recently published in the States called The Coming Economic Earthquake, by Larry Burkett. I can only assume Mr Burkett knows what he’s talking about, being a native of the country.

In the face of national collapse – there’s something we could show the Yanks a thing or two about – the federal government spent $49 million for a rock and roll museum. (That’s getting up towards $NZ150 million.) Plainly King Elvis still has the hearts of some Americans by the purse-strings.

Talking about hearts, they only spent a paltry $84,000 to study why people fall in love. That’s a leap from the sublime to the ridiculous. (Yeah, year, I know: a lover’s leap.) I’d be interested to bone up on some of the findings in this case. Hopefully they weren’t taken from television.

There people only fall in love, it seems, so that circumstances will get in their way and cause them temporary heartbreak until the last few moments of the episode’s half-hour are up. Of course, if it’s a soap, next week they’ll be forced to fall out of love almost as quickly, and probably reveal that they have some dim dark secret that hadn’t previously been known about by either actors or scriptwriters.

Back to US spending. $19 million to study whether belching by cows and other livestock harms the ozone hardly comes as a surprise, but $219,592 to teach college students how to watch television? I thought most American college students would be beyond this teaching.

Actually that’s a little unfair. If people I know are anything to go by, many of them need to be taught how to watch television. First lesson is to know where the off-button is – you’d be surprised how hard that off-button can be to find. They also need lessons in discernment. This would help them appreciate that the sitcom they’re now watching is exactly the same as the four other sitcoms they’ve viewed in the last two hours.

Of course, the Senate spent a good deal of money on itself, $6.5 million between the subway system and the beauty parlour. But my two favourites were the following: $500,000 to study the effects of cigarette smoking not on people, but on dogs, and, wait for it, $46,000 to determine how long it takes to cook breakfast eggs.

Doesn’t that make you feel as though New Zealand is partially sane?

 

‘Take a gecko’ seems to have been an expression I made up, or else it’s a piece of very outdated slang. Google doesn’t recognise it at all. I possibly meant ‘take a geek,’ which actually is a piece of slang meaning ‘have a look at,’ and has nothing to do with dealing in any way with a human nerd.

As for NZ being partially sane, perhaps they in 1992, but I frequently see tweets nowadays on X (was Twitter) telling us how much has been spent by Creative New Zealand on various arts applications. In 2020 the Taxpayers’ Union summarised a number of the applications that were funded – you can read about them here.

Incidentally, the US national debt is currently over $38 trillion.

Larry Burkett’s book has apparently stood the test of time: his predictions didn’t always reach their target as far as the year was concerned, but for the most part they have come about as he said they would.