The Federal Index

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, linked here if you can’t see it for some reason, I’d like to bring the monster known as the U.S. Federal Government into my little “index” for perspective on vast amounts of dollars.

To recap, for reasons given in the previous post, we proposed a “soros” equal to $25 billion dollars.

Then we compared some bigwig businessmen, some politicians, and even humble old me on that index, that range of wealth, that the big movers and shakers of the financial – and cultural – world.

But immediately after posting I realized I should have re-imaged all of that against Uncle Sam. For comparative perspective reasoning. Since I wrote and posted late last night, I was too exhausted to re-edit the post.

So …

The wealthiest man in yesterday’s post is the man probably everybody thinks is the wealthiest man in the world – Bill Gates. I don’t know if this is true and it currently doesn’t interest me. But Mr. Gates ranked in at 3.1 soros. A little more than three times the wealth of George Soros. Since one soros is $25 billion, 3.1 comes out to around $77.5 billion or so, about what I found on the internet yesterday.

What about the U.S. federal government?

Quick googling tells me the estimated federal spending for 2015 was $3.69 trillion dollars.

That’s 147.6 soros. That’s almost a soros every two-and-a-half days.

This result conflicts me. Obviously it’s a huge number, but I expected something huger.

How about – how much does Uncle Sam spend per hour, in both units of measurement?

Well, there are 8,760 hours in a year, so simple division tells us that the hourly spending rate is roughly $420 million, or around 0.016 soros, which falls somewhat neatly proportionate-wise between our two Presidential candidates (almost ten times larger than the alleged net worth of one and almost ten times smaller than the alleged net worth of the other).

Still not sure to make of this, except to put it all out there rambling style, and iterate the obvious conclusion that while the federal government’s annual spending is an incredibly almost inconceivably large number, so is a soros.