Practical definition: Chutzpah

Posted by Marc Hodak on October 7, 2007 under Practical definitions | 2 Comments to Read

I’ve been seeing these ads on TV with a child saying, “I’m too young to vote, but if I could…” they say they would vote for the candidate who will “fix” health care, and protect Social Security and pensions. This ad is sponsored by the AARP.

This is my new definition of chutzpah.

For those of you who haven’t studied the numbers, AARP is the organization most committed to the greatest inter-generational wealth transfer in world history. They have saddled today’s kids, those cute ragamuffins who can’t yet vote, with $39 trillion in liabilities in excess of assets for Social Security and Medicare. Now, the AARP wants to continue that campaign in the name of the kids.

(Below the fold is a math challenge)

I don’t think anyone can really “get” 39 trillion. It’s genuinely too large a number for me to get my mind around, even though I deal with big numbers all day. I challenge you to come up with an adequate description: Here is my meager attempt:

– Imagine a string of $1,000 bills all the way up the side of the building where your work. Now imagine that string of bills continuing up into the sky, twenty times higher than the tallest building, to the cruising altitude of commercial airlines; then imagine it going far beyond that through the stratosphere to the height of the Space Shuttle’s orbit, then hundreds of times farther than that to where communications satellites orbit, then way, way past that orbit all the way to the moon. Thousand dollar bills strung from the earth to the moon…it still wouldn’t be nearly enough to cover that deficit.

Update/correction: My original example used $100 bills. I was so naive. OK, mathematically illiterate. It goes to show how the mind boggles at these numbers. It turns out the example works perfectly well with $1,000 bills. I’m not sure I’ve actually ever seen one of those, but that makes this example even more compelling for me.