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Re: Innumeracy at the NY Times



What! according to http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

it's already ~ 7 thousand billion.


is that trillions? - To get an idea of how small 4 B. is, consider how
many middle class homes that would buy in a CA city. To simplify
matters I look in the local (Salinas- Steinbeck's birth place) rag and
find the vast majority of homes advertised are > 1/3 million. I get
ONLY 12 thousand!

John Mallinckrodt wrote:

The U.S. budget deficit over the next decade is anticipated to be $4
THOUSAND billion. Not $4 billion; $4 THOUSAND billion or forty
hundred thousand million dollars. (Yes, I know there are places
where "billion" means "million million". New York is not one of
those places.)

Four billion dollars is truly chump change. It represents
irreducible noise in even an annual U.S. budget.

--
John Mallinckrodt mailto:ajm@csupomona.edu
Cal Poly Pomona http://www.csupomona.edu/~ajm