5
Not a tranquil week for Wall Street
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as the Federal Reserve announces that it will be keeping its key interest rate near zero in New York.
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About the author
Kai Ryssdal is the host and senior editor of Marketplace, public radio’s program on business and the economy. Follow Kai on Twitter @kairyssdal.
Oops! The whole purpose of my last comment was to complain that a show like Marketplace, which is specifically centered on economics, frequently has bad math and a lack of precision about units-of-measure (percent of what?). Can't you run your numbers by a mathematician before finalizing your scripts? It's a bit embarrassing! It may be hard to tell but I love the show and listen to the full podcasts every day. I'm just cursed with being an engineer who ended up in IT. Doubly cursed, but forced to always check your math due to lack of confidence.
I was about to submit a comment on my own calculation of 30,000 versus 1,000 dollars but I see I'm not alone in having skills in elementary school math.
Unfortunately, this is only one of many times I've noticed horrendous math errors in both print and broadcast journalism. My biggest pet peeve is the lack of qualifiers when throwing out numbers (e.g. "Inflation went up by 1% last month" -- 1% per month or on an annualized basis?) In this story we have "The sum total of everything we produce in the country would have to be used to pay off our debt if we wanted to do that." Absolutely, if we wanted to pay off the entire national debt in a single year. Seems unlikely ...
I believe the comment on the $30,000 per every man woman and child is correct. Namely, the additional debt will be just over $9B ($9 x 10(12)). There are roughly 300 million (3 x 10(8) people in the US. That comes out to roughly 3 x 10(4), or $30,000 per man woman & child. This is in ADDITION to the approx. $30,000 every man, woman & child already owe on the current national debt.
We often talk about debt affecting "future generations". However, net interest on public debt is already $260B/year and will more than double by 2019. If we had not accumulated this past debt we would have had that much more to spend now on other programs.
