Leslie and I are trying to get a handle on the dizzying flow of news coming out of Washington and Wall Street this weekend.  As the late Senator Everett Dirksen famously once said, “A Billion Here, A Billion There, Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Money”.

9 zeros don’t mean anything to me, so I broke it down into little numbers I can handle. There are about 300,000,000 of us Americans. I divided that into that “other” big number and came up with about $2,333 per person. So if you’re a family of four, you may be asked to go into debt about $9,300 to get us back on our feet again.

Assuming that debt has to be paid back somehow, sometime, I used a figure of 4% which is about what Treasury yields are right now. How long will it take “us” to pay “us” back? Who knows? We tend to just keep re-financing our debt by rolling it over and over, but I have to start somewhere.

So I assumed it to be like a 30 year mortgage most of us homeowners understand. $2,333 at 4% over 30 years comes to “only” $11.14 a month for each of us, or about $45 a month for a family of four. You can afford that can’t you? Just don’t put so much gas in your car, or skip a meal or two! Sorry if I’m sounding a bit cynical…