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December 30, 2004
Adding Zeros
There's been a bunch of debate about whether the US was called stingy with disaster relief for the tsunami in South East Asia or not. And not a lot of perspective. So here are two good comparisons.
1. $35 million is about the cost of the presidential inauguration ceremony next month.**
2. $35 million is about what we spend every 4 hours in Iraq.*
I’m not sure how much we should send, but when I heard $15 and then $35 million, I did think the amount was missing a zero or two. So last night I sent a couple of zeros ($100) to the Red Cross for disaster relief. And maybe that’s an idea worth passing on. A positive protest against a government whose priorities are wrong by at least 2 orders of magnitude. If you can, I encourage you to do the same.
* I saw this on a blog and don’t know what it is based on, so I did my own calculation. $200,000,000,000 divided by 700 days (about 2 years) divided by 6 (to get every 4 hours) equals about 47.6 million. Close enough.
** I’m not saying we’re spending too much on the ceremony. Not my area of expertise. It’s about the most important ceremony we have and it should be grand.
Posted by dme at December 30, 2004 11:50 AM
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