Politics as Usual

It's been a while since my last update, but that's okay because I'm quite happy about this one. Sometimes I talk about technology here, sometimes about politics: Today I'm talking about both.

There are several webpages out there that will give you an extrapolated guess about the national debt. Or you can read about it in the paper sometimes. It's a pretty big number. Personally, I think it's difficult for people to conceptualize a number that big; it's not something that fits into their established mental models. It occured to me to write a little web script that would express the national debt in terms of things with which people may be slightly more familiar. It's running on my EECS-department webspace now, so you can go fiddle with it here.

(That webpage is secretly part of my "George W. Bush is NOT a conservative and neither are any of the other Republican leaders" campaign -- deficit spending, hello, see the big red number with the dash in front of it? But we can pretend that it's just something for everyone's enlightenment and/or entertainment.)

If you spend some time playing with the thing, do me a favor and let me know what other objects you'd like to see used as measurements of the federal debt.

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Comments

How much is that in Libraries of Congress? Yeesh - at least use standard units like Volkswagon Beetles! ;-)

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Posted by Grayden MacLennan on October 14, 2005 10:55 AM

Do you prefer the '67 or the '05 model? ;-)

Now to go find out how much the Library of Congress is worth...

Posted by Mark on October 14, 2005 12:50 PM

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