There are many possible responses to the news that the United States government
has committed more than US$4 trillion of public money to Wall Street. Mine is a
roar of admiration. Four trillion dollars! Holy hell! I didn't even know that
was possible! USA! USA!
After all, the cost of World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars was $4
trillion. This bailout thing is just getting started, and already we've burned
through that. Without even noticing. Certainly without rationing sugar or
collecting scrap rubber or any of that nonsense. Who's the Greatest Generation
now, baby?
Admit it. You feel it too. Just imagine someone snatching your laptop off a
table and throwing it, Olympic-discus style, hundreds ... and hundreds ... and
hundreds of feet. Sure, you'd be upset (and stuck with the bill). But however
briefly, you'd feel
admiration for the physical feat. Look at that thing fly!
So it goes with our bailouts, wild tax cuts, and war budgets. The money in play
is staggering, but everyone acts like that's something to mope about. Where's
the excitement?
Often, after reading an incomprehensible dollar figure, I'll Google "What does
a trillion dollars look like?" to get myself fired up. One example of where
this takes you shows a million dollars (pathetic, wouldn't fill a grocery bag),
a billion (interesting, I could fit it in a truck), and then a trillion. (Wow,
it spreads for acres! Look at that tiny human included for scale!)
It turns out that the United States can pick up that sort of weight and just
smash it down on whatever the hell we want. Like Optimus Prime with giant
square green paper fists. Slam! Slam! Yet we've committed not one trillion
dollars to the incompetent and/or corrupt, but more than four trillion dollars.
That's according to a report to Congress from special inspector general Neil
Barofsky, the overseer of the bank bailout program.
Technically, Barofsky adds, Wall Street's IOU to you and me is at about $3
trillion these days, since some of it's been paid back. Relieved? Don't be. As
these tsunamis of public wealth pour out, ignore the slosh and focus on the
order of magnitude. The entire gross domestic product - the number reflecting
all wealth generated in this nation for this year - is only $14.1 trillion. So
whether the sum of our money that's now their money is $3 trillion (one-fifth
of all wealth generated in the US in a year) or $4.7 trillion (one-third of all
wealth generated in the US in a year), it still means that, for a big chunk of
the year, every single one of us was working for Goldman Sachs et al.
Barofsky's report also suggests that Wall Street's tab might ultimately work
out to $24 trillion, which would be $80,000 per American, or $320,000 for a
family of four. But that's, like, totally the worst-case scenario. Still,
wouldn't it be impressive? I envision huge, five-foot-cubed, shrink-wrapped
pallets of dollars dropping from the sky onto my neighborhood, smashing houses,
crushing cars, killing beloved pets, blasting craters into asphalt streets.
Yeah!
Smallpox and bikinis
And yet could we employ this financial muscle in a more constructive way? For
an illuminating example, consider how we dealt with smallpox. That airborne
virus, with its mind-blowing fevers and signature pus-filled skin eruptions,
was the greatest killer of man ever known. In the 20th century, smallpox killed
more people than all of that bloody century's wars combined.
In fact, if you tally the worldwide death tolls for World Wars I and II, the
Korean and Vietnam wars, the Iran-Iraq war and the Mexican Revolution, the
civil wars in China and Russia and Spain, and all the other wars of the last
century, from Afghanistan to Zaire, the total is less than one-third of the
smallpox death toll.
And that's just a single 100-year period, for a disease that disfigured
Egyptian pharaohs, allied with Hernando Cortes to rout the Aztecs, left a young
George Washington scarred, later stalked his Continental Army, and left Abraham
Lincoln pale, weak, and dizzy as he delivered his Gettysburg Address.
And yet, in the 1960s, smallpox was targeted by visionary public health experts
- and in just 10 years it was gone. An excellent new book by DA Henderson, the
doctor who led the effort, tells the story: Smallpox: The Death of a Disease.
This was a signature achievement, up there with defeating the Nazis or walking
on the moon. I began to wonder how many five-foot-cubed pallets of Benjamins
the world had brought to bear to track down a virus in every corner of the
planet, encircle it with vaccinations and kill it. After all, this was
mankind's greatest killer - the Joker to our Batman, Lex Luthor to our
Superman. The amounts of cash flung about must have been awe-inspiring.
Chasing down the cost of the 10-year eradication campaign was not easy.
Eventually, Dr Henderson himself steered me to a 1,450-page official history of
smallpox maintained as a PDF in a sleepy corner of the website of the World
Health Organization (WHO). The answer, hidden away on page 1,366: $300 million.
Three hundred million? Not trillion? Not even billion?
Such a tiny sum of money for such a tremendous feat? It's like hitting a home
run at Fenway Park using a chopstick for a bat.
The price paid to defeat humanity's greatest foe wouldn't cover a 24-hour day
of Iraqi combat operations. In Wall Street bailout terms, there's no way to
even talk about sums this tiny. To do that, we have to go the level of
overcompensated individuals. So, sure, $300 million could eradicate history's
greatest killer of humans - yet the same sum wouldn't cover the bonus pool for
the executives of the insurance company AIG after its great meltdown. It's less
than what just one man, Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, pulled down over the
past five years.
It's even more striking if you remember that this was a price tag for a
worldwide program whose cost was shared by multiple governments; and also a
total cost over a 10-year period. To think about it in annual budgeting terms,
it works out to $30 million a year. Which is approaching the ridiculous. Hell,
the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for 2006 featured a blond in a bikini of
diamonds worth $30 million.
These are sad economic times, sadder still when you consider the tsunamis of
wealth going to waste: $4 trillion for Wall Street welfare queens; somewhere
from one to three trillion dollars for anyone affluent enough to own a top hat
and a monocle; another trillion or so (and counting) for our current military
escapades abroad.
But it's also just damned exciting. Because, frankly, it's a helluva lot of
money we have to play with! Even now, at one of our darkest economic hours, we
could be performing miracles with the spare change left behind the national
couch cushions.
If you're an engineering type, you might prefer that those miracles involve
shoring up our creaking national infrastructure. Good! Go write your own
article.
I'm a doctor so I'll stick with medical possibilities. Since the smallpox
triumph, public health experts have been inspired to target other diseases for
eradication. One is polio, a virus known for paralyzing a minority of its
unluckiest victims, among them former president Franklin D Roosevelt; two other
targets are Guinea worm and leprosy, plagues dating back to the Biblical era.
The WHO and the volunteer service organization Rotary International have spent
two decades tracking down and vaccinating billions of people against polio.
They calculate that they've prevented the paralysis of five million children
worldwide.
Just this May, a 10-day frenzy saw the immunization of more than 222 million
children in Africa and Asia. It was possible to watch the campaigners' march
through Africa on Google Maps. Among the foot soldiers in that vaccine war was
Ali Mao Moallim, who more than three decades ago became the last person on
Earth to contract wild smallpox. (Others have caught smallpox in the laboratory
since.)
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