To make sense of the numbers, just do the math ...

I’ll readily admit a prejudice against people who can’t do simple math. 

I’m talking about the basic stuff – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

I’m certainly no math snob.  Trust me, like most of us, I haven’t faced a quadratic equation to solve since I left high school.  That’s good, because I wouldn’t remember how – if I ever did.  I’ve never had a need for most of the algebra I sat through in school. That’s the truth. 

My wife was taking a college course once and asked me how I would solve it one of its math problems. I told her my solution. She told me I was wrong. I told her I didn’t care anymore.

But I’m a whiz at the basics.  Maybe it was all those years of drilling on multiplication tables and the endless hours doing long division, but most times I don’t need a calculator.  If I can’t do the math in my head, then I just need paper and pencil.  It’s not that hard.

So I’m stunned when a number comes out and people don’t understand how over-the-top it is.  All they’d have to do is divide that number by whatever to see how excessive it is. 

When it was announced that Rick Perry was sending 1,000 National Guard troops to secure his southern border at a cost of $12 million a month, nobody blinked.  Except me, apparently. 

Since a thousand thousands is a million, that meant it would cost $12,000 a month, per Guardsman, to patrol the border.  Roll that up and that’s $144,000 a year, per Guardsman. 

Now, I believe we don’t pay our soldiers enough, and I’m sure there are associated expenses I’m not considering, but I’m going to go way out on limb here and say something is wrong with this number.  I’m betting those Guardsmen aren’t making $50,000 a year on average for active duty.  So what accounts for the other $94,000? Housing?  Even if we put each Guardsman up in their own apartment for $2000 a month that’s only $24,000. Food? I think they could eat pretty well – like at $150 a day – on the remaining $70,000 and still have $15,250 left over for incidentals and entertainment. 

Then there are those government contracts issued to house and feed the illegal alien kids streaming across our border.  Somebody did the math and it came out to almost $350 a day per kid. You could put them up at an all-inclusive resort for that.  No wonder they’re coming here. 

Then there are the various make-work government programs.  Someone calculated that in one big stimulus program alone, each new job created cost almost $150,000. In other Federal "jobs" programs, the cost per job is even higher.    

A few years back HUD investigated a program that gave Philly roughly $50 million to provide grants to homeowners for rehabbing their properties.  That investigation revealed the city gave out only a handful of grants, but the $50 million was completely gone – consumed by “administrative expenses.” That might have surprised HUD but not anybody who knows how the city works.   

So where do these numbers come from? 

And why isn’t anybody paying any attention to them? 

I have two theories. 

The first is the belief by politicians and the general public that the government has access to endless supplies of money from the taxes it collects, and also because it can print money.  They honestly believe our government is Scrooge McDuck rich, wallowing in money.  And all that money is just looking for a place to be spent.  If we start running out, we can simply print more.  So government money is like “found” money; if there’s waste, so what? 

My second theory is that most of the public has reached what I call the point of diminishing astonishment.  A million bucks was once a big number.  Until we got used to billions. And now that the national debt is in the trillions, a billion dollars can seem kind of small.  Everything’s relative. 

So when Obama originally asked for $2 billion in Federal money to take care of the 50,000 illegal kids who crossed our border recently not many people blinked.  That’s $40,000 per kid, BTW.  Then, Obama almost doubled down by raising the request to $3.7 billion for the same 50,000 kids.  Now we’re talking about $74,000 per kid. 

To put that in perspective, we could probably fly each of those kids back to where they came from on their own chartered private jet for less. 

But that’s not the point.  It’s not about the math.  It’s not about a cost/benefit analysis. 

It’s all about the optics; the appearance of "doing something." And the realization that the public really doesn’t understand the numbers anymore.  It’s easier than ever before to pad the bills to cover wasteful government programs and egregiously overpriced contracts handed out to cronies. 

Former U.S. Senator William Proxmire used to put out his annual Golden Fleece Awards to spotlight often ridiculous government projects.  More recently Senator Tom Coburn has published his annual “Wastebook.”  The media always had a good time with stuff like rabbit massages at Ohio State, teaching mountain lions to use treadmills and other goofy programs funded by the government.  Fun yes, but all of this is pretty small stuff – maybe $25 billion in the latest Wastebook; not even a rounding error in a trillion-dollar Federal budget. 

The real question is whether our politicians and bureaucrats are spending far more than we need to on practically everything.  I suspect we are.  And I suspect the reason has more to do with political payoffs, Congressional back-scratching and home-state pork than anything else.  A lot of the numbers just don’t make any sense when you analyze them. 

If I can do the math, so can those in Washington. They’re hoping you don’t bother.

So the next time politicians start yammering about the need to raise taxes, why we can’t cut spending, and the budget deficit, realize it’s all crap.

Just do the math.