Obamanomics: Creative Quantification

I am no economist, but it seems to me that if we have a trillion dollar national debt and we pass a trillion dollar spending package, we have spent money that we don’t have, therefore we now have a 2 trillion dollar national debt, but some in the Obama camp are claiming that the spending bill (the first of many to come) is going to reduce the trillion dollar debt to half a trillion dollars.  So according to team Obama, negative 1 trillion plus negative 1 trillion equals negative .5 trillion. 

I call this the “theory of creative quantification” and it will revolutionize all kinds of statistical categories.  In fact this kind of math stands to historically justify its original proponents, who have been unfairly lambasted by a media and a public too accustomed to the old ways of thinking: Enron, Madoff, Ponzi, Nigerian princes looking to make me exquisite returns for a minor starter investment of $1000 via the internet, and the guy selling the Brooklyn Bridge.  Under the new mathematical regime, all of these great pioneers will finally be given their rightful honors for their ground-breaking work in creative quantification.   

Another strategy that the Obama regime may want to employ in the interim, the time required for the common man to come to terms with the new mathematics, is a focus on the numbers “zero” and “infinity”.  Since most of us are not advanced enough mathematically to comprehend the new math of creative quantification, the Obama team should prepare us for the switch by softening the effects of actual numbers on our minds.  I believe that Mr. Obama should use the word “infinity” in every speech.  Just as Cato ended every speech, no matter the topic, with his favorite catch phrase, “Carthago delenda est”, I think that Mr. Obama should use a special “infinity” catch phrase.  I am no speech writer, but if he were to say something like, “1 trillion dollars, a penny compared to infinity”, after each speech, I think that we all would start to understand the new value of numbers. 

To emphasize the relativity of numericals, he might want to give a discourse on the nature of the number line.  This would spice up any of his weekly policy speeches.  Once Mr. Obama explains to the American people how the numbers on the number line progress and regress infinitely, and that the infinite progress-regress creates a situation of the eternal crossing out of opposites, we will begin to see that there is only one real number: zero. 

Once we focus on infinity and zero, numbers like 2 trillion will cause us no more fear.   We will have reasonable parameters to frame the debate of how much debt is too much debt.  If we end up with zero dollars, we will be ecstatic, since zero is a lot more than negative 2 trillion.  If we never get out of debt, we can reassure ourselves that we will never be in the maximum amount of debt possible, since infinity always is staying many steps ahead of our ability to print, to borrow, and to spend dollars.

Who said that math was boring?