Many billions for your thoughts

BC Pires -
BC Pires -

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

BACK IN 1986, one of the killer blows the National Alliance for Reconstruction struck when it knocked the PNM out of its “natural” state of government was an old Organisation for National Reconstruction slogan, plastered over thousands of giveaway “joeseys”: $56 billion – whey de money gone?

It was and remains a mind-boggling figure. To wrap my own mind around it for a column in 1988, I borrowed an IT-techie friend’s “scientific calculator,” which alone in those days had a screen that showed enough decimal places to actually depict 56,000,000. Most calculator screens could not show a million.

Now I didn’t need a calculator to work out that, if you spent a dollar a second, you would spend $60 in a minute and $3,600 in an hour. In a 24-hour day, if you stayed awake all the time and did nothing but spend a dollar a second – one little dollar, two little dollars, three little dollars and so on – you would spend $86,400.

It would take – if you didn’t eat or smoke or play tennis or drive to work but just spent a dollar a second for 24 hours a day – it would take you 12 days to push yourself over the million-dollar spending mark – and even then, you’d only have squeaked past that first mill by 36,800 bucks!

If, for a full year, you spent a dollar a second without losing a single solitary second to sleep, use the toilet, staring into the beloved’s eyes, throwing an ear on the cricket or eating lemon chicken, in one year, 365 days, you’d have managed to spend just over $31.5 million – $31,536,000, to be precise.

If you did nothing but spend a dollar a second morning, noon and night, nothing else but spend a dollar now, another dollar now, another dollar now…you still couldn’t spend a billion dollars in three full years of spending a dollar every single second! You’d be tottering close to the billion at $94,608,000.

It would take you three and a half years of spending a dollar now, another dollar now, another dollar now, another dollar now to spend just one billion dollars.

To spend $56 billion, if you did nothing but spend a dollar a second, one little dollar now, two little dollars now, three little dollars now, it would take you three months shy of 1,776 years!

Morning, noon and night of spending a dollar a second, a dollar now, a dollar now, a dollar now…for 1,775.75 years!

You would begin spending at the birth of Christ and still be spending, almost, at the birth of the United States. Your spending would have been witnessed by Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, Mary, Queen of Scots, Ivan the Terrible and William Shakespeare.

That is how much money the PNM had squandered in their 30 years of occupation of the government benches in the Red House; this is how much time it could have taken them if they’d thought for a second about where the money was going.

It’s a mind-boggling sum. But it’s a trivial one, nowadays.

For the last ten or more years – it’s too depressing to check the annual figures – the national budget has averaged about $50 billion every year.

Every year, whether they’ve worn red or yellow T-shirts at their rallies, groups that have described themselves, legally correctly, as the Government of TT have spent, in a single year, sums as great as or greater than the $56 billion it would have taken the original Dr Eric Williams PNM fully 1,775 years-plus to spend.

If anybody spending the money gave it a second’s firetrucking thought.

Every year, for decades, we have spent sums it ought to take close to 2,000 years of spending a dollar a second to spend.

The sums are genuinely astronomical. They are celestial, imaginable only in outer space, as close to touching infinity as little Caribbean islanders can ever hope to get.

Where the money gone? What have we got to show for it?

More important, perhaps, is the question: how did we get this money? What have we done to deserve it?

The answer to both questions is the same. Nothing.

We know the only thing the people who spent these vast sums did before taking control of those amounts: they fooled sometimes as few as hundreds of people in as few as five marginal seats to vote for them.

The rest of us have done nothing whatever to deserve these sums. And now we don’t have them any more.

Happy firetrucking independence.

BC Pires is a checker on a ten hundred thousand days. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com

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"Many billions for your thoughts"

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