64 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
64 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
SILLY ANALOGIES
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By M.L. Verb
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The other morning a fellow on the radio was talking about the national debt,
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which is what most people on the radio talk about. That and baseball. At least
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baseball is real.
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Anyway, this fellow, whoever he was, was trying to help listeners understand
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how big the national debt is. Which meant trying to explain how much nearly $2
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trillion is. "A lot" apparently wasn't sufficiently detailed for him.
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If you bought $2 trillion worth of gasoline, he said, it would be enough to
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drive a car to the nearest star.
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It was the sort of silly analogy you hear a lot of these days. In the first
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place, my car only holds 12.4 gallons, which won't even get me to Chicago.
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Second, even if I could put $2 trillion worth of gas in my car, it would take
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several billion dollars worth beyond that because of the inevitable number of
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times I'd get lost or be forced to burn up fuel looking for a restroom for one
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of my kids.
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People are always spouting off these goofy analogies in an attempt to make
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things clearer. But they seldom help.
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For instance, I know you've heard that if you spent $1 a second beginning at
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the birth of Jesus Christ and continuing until today the total would only be
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half of the Fiscal '86 budget of the state of Connecticut (or some such amount.
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I could figure this out or look it up but that would be a waste of time and it
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wouldn't change the stupidity of the statement anyway.)
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Besides the obvious ones, there are many reasons that's a goofy way to explain
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how much money a certain amount is. For instance, the analogy doesn't take into
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consideration the probability that the people behind you in line at the store
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where you are spending $1 a second at the cash register aren't going to stand
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there docilely forever. They'll pick you up by the scruff of your collar and
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pitch you out of the Express Line. I've seen people in the Express Line, have
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looked in to their harsh, accusing eyes. They are not to be fooled with.
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People in Express Lines should be considered armed and dangerous.
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Another comparison you often hear goes something like, "For what it costs to
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build one wing of an F-18 1/2 fighter jet you could build six hospitals, eight
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schools and raise all of Appalachia out of poverty."
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I'm no shill for the Pentagon, but that's a wacky thing to say. And not just
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because of the obvious bureaucratic difficulty of moving money from the F-18 1/2
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construction budget to the Wipe-Out-Poverty-in-Appalachia budget.
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No, a bigger drawback is that the equation changes so quickly that whatever
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you say about fighter jet costs is outdated almost before you say it. That's
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because whatever a fighter jet wing costs today, it'll cost lot more an hour
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from now and even more by tomorrow morning. By next year the price of such a
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wing might be enough to lift the Third World into the Second World.
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The point is not that we shouldn't think critically about a lot of these
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things. We should. But I always find it hard to swallow when I hear that for
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what the American people spend on booze or chewing gum they could end both
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teen-age pregnancy and acne. Or that most baseball players make more than the
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Gross National Product of two-thirds of the countries in Africa.
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Or that if the cost of producing this article had been donated to charity it
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would have fed a family of five for a week. To which I say: Not mine, it
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wouldn't have.
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