Reason Writers on the Tube: Katherine Mangu-Ward Talks Bankruptcy, Rand Paul, and Newt at Freedom Watch

Reason Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano to discuss the government's plan to raid the federal pension fund to pay the bills, Senate Republicans' efforts to block Rand Paul from getting a committee seat, and Newt Gingrich's claim that Paul Ryan's proposed Medicare reforms are too radical. Airdate: May 16, 2011.

Approximately 8 minutes.

Comments

[Irate Commentator]

No one gives a fuck about Newt. Stop building his brand.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Making Henican get inside Gingrich's head is just cruel.

[Mainer]

That little fuck in the middle with the white hair can lick my ass.

just sayin...

[sage]

The other two can lick mine. Just sayin...

[The Gobbler]

Licking their's would be my preference.

[Sudden]

So because I often have trouble in relaying the scale of our deficit (let alone our total debt) to other people, I decided to a little basic calculation.

A dollar bill is approximately 5.375 inches long. Lined up end to end, there are 2.232 dollar bills per foot. There are 11,787 dollar bills per mile. Assuming the deficit at $1.7 trillion, the current year's projection give or take, there operating deficit for this country is about 6.93 billion miles long.

7 billion fucking miles. ~49 astronomical units (AU). About long enough to reach Pluto at its most elliptically far position from this planet.

Tell people like that, and maybe they'll begin to fucking understand. Or, I put far too much faith in people's ability to grasp how cosmically far away Pluto is compared to all other planets.

[Joe M]

I read a few months ago someone suggesting that the term "astronomical" for extremely large numbers was no longer appropriate, and that a term such as "economical" would be better.

[Sudden]

NM. Totally fucked up my calculation. It turns out its only 144 million miles. My bad, not even enough to reach the moon. Still, fucking 144 million miles.

[Sudden]

Stupid dividing by the wrong number.

[The Gobbler]

If you spend one million dollars a day, you will need three years to spend one billion.

Assuming the deficit at $1.7 trillion, if you spend one million dollars a day, you will need nearly five thousand years to spend that amount. Five thousand years ago would be just about the time they started building Stonehenge or about seventeen hundred years before Moses was born.

And our sick fuck president wants to spend this much every year.

[Sudden]

Do it with our total real debt, including state and local governments as well as SS/MC obligations. ~$140 trillion...

383,561 years, not quite long enough to see the bifurcation of homo sapiens and neanderthals, sadly.

[TrickyVic]

""Tell people like that, and maybe they'll begin to fucking understand.""

No, that goes way over their head. I refer people to this website.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

[TrickyVic]

Many people don't understand about buying things on credit cards, minimum payments, and how much they really paid for that $100 item.

let's stick to supporting Johnson and Paul and wait to see what a Daniels presidential run will really look like before saying he's our great hope.

i'm sure enough other people will be calling for a Daniels run

[Max]

Supporting any of these libertoid nutjobs is like masterbating into a spittoon--nothing will come of it.

[Fiscal Meth]

I liked KMW's made for TV movie drug addict reference.

[Nicolas]

"[Indiana governor Mitch] Daniels isn't bad from a libertarian point of view." - Mangu-Ward.

It's this sort of comment that discredits Reason as a libertarian magazine. As a Hoosier libertarian I've carefully observed Daniels for years, and his actions on economic freedom and civil liberties have been awful. To take just two examples, he's increased the number of licensed occupations, and he is responsible for the composition of the state supreme court that just ruled that citizens could not resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

It isn't hard to imagine Mangu-Ward finding a "libertarian" silver lining in FDR's cloud.