One Million Dollars

I've never really been fond of politics. I generally stay away from politics as blog topics. We've been hearing so much about this seven hundred billion dollar bucket of cash (or is that credit?) that the government is spreading willy-nilly around the financial industry. I can't claim to fully understand what it's supposed to do, since everything I've read about is says that it will do absolutely nothing. Maybe I need some new reading material. Anyway, it's been said that this sum of seven hundred billion dollars is just "a drop in the bucket" of our national budget. I tried to wrap my mind around this figure, from my own small bill spending point of view. I couldn't. In fact, my calculator does not even accept enough digits for such a figure. So I broke it up a bit. One million dollars is a lot of money. Still, I am able to put a number like this in perspective by comparing it to the price of my house. This "drop in the bucket" became more manageable when broken into bite-sized million dollar chunks. In fact it makes seven hundred thousand bite-sized chunks. That's a rather large number by itself.

That's when it hit me. If the government wants us to be optimistic, why not throw out some big wads of cash. How about a national lottery. I can just see it now. Every person, or every household in the country who paid income tax last year is automatically entered in a lottery to be one of seven hundred thousand winners of one million dollars each. If the aim is to get money to those lending it, I believe that this would do the trick. I imagine a scene similar to an elated Jimmy Stewart at a table in his living room with a basket collecting payments from smiling customers as they file past, happy to have paid their mortgages in full, while helping that nice man who owns the bank. Now I know that wasn't the plot of "It's a Wonderful Life", but in my little world the sentiment is the same.

Then after the credit cards, the school loans, the car loans and the mortgage are paid off, and there is still money left, the best part happens. Dreams get fulfilled. Sure, some may choose to blow the wad on a Bentley or maybe blow it at the race track or the stock market. Others, however, may have had their eye on a vacant corner deli. Maybe others dream of raising alpacas in the Ozarks or building fine hardwood furniture. Perhaps they will even hire a few of their neighbors to help out if things take off.

With seven hundred thousand chances there have to be at least a few success stories. For the rest of us there's the hope that next year our social security number might be chosen in the federal lottery. Hope is worth something too.