TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS ASTRONOMICAL PROBLEMS

According to the radio, the Affordable Care Act (that’s ObamaCare to the uninitiated) will cost each employer of more than 50 people $1.79 per hour for each employee next year. That explains why major employers are planning on laying off or reducing the hours of workers to make them part-timers. Doing so will keep some of those companies in business.

Do a little simple arithmetic and the enormity of the entrepreneur’s quandary emerges.

Multiplying 40 hours by 52 weeks of work and vacation and the product is 2,080 hours of paid work. Assign an extra $1.79 per hour and the boss has to lay out an additional $3,723.20 a year to overhead for each employee. For each 50 employees, the additional cost of business is $186,160 per year.

That’s 186 thousand dollars that reduces profits. For each 50 employees.

So it does not take a Bill Gates to figure out that a small businessman cutting back one employee to 49 makes a lot of sense. Or cutting the wager earner’s hours to make him or her part time. For the employer with hundreds in his workforce, the problem is just as big. For national firms, the problem is a major expense and concern, maybe even a game changer when competing with rival corporations.

To a government that can’t balance a budget, that can’t pay for its obligations even though it takes in some two and a third trillion dollars a year such problems for those responsible for producing an economy that is supposed to pay for government seem miniscule. The federal government is a multitrillion dollar affair; does a trillion dollar private enterprise even exist?

And isn’t that the summation of the burden our nation must face?

Federal spending was more than three and half trillion in 2011. The deficit was just under one trillion, 300 million dollars.

Our – and that means for each and every man, woman and child in these United States of America – debt is approaching sixteen and a half trillion dollars.

Whoa!

How much is that? All kinds of illustrations are available from people who care. Just look at one way of looking at the enormity of just one trillion. Convert that into time.

Someone has calculated that one trillion seconds – that’s one sixtieth of a minute, 3,600^th of an hour, 86,400^th of a day – equal 31,546 years.

To pay off our national debt at one dollar per second would take more than a half million years (504,736 years for an even $16 trillion).

That can hardly be imagined.

It’s something like trying to fix one’s mind on how close is the nearest star? That star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years from the sun, which is 93 million miles from the earth. A light year equals 5.88 million miles, so that star is some 25.2 million miles beyond the sun. Thus, the star is 118.2 million miles from earth. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. Well, home calculators don’t have enough display space to do the math. Nonetheless, since a trillion is one million millions it would take more than a trillion seconds to travel that distance at the speed of light, or more than 32 thousand years.

Look at it another way. Total gross national product for the United States in 2011 was just over 15 trillion dollars, which is less than our growing national debt. Each year, the government is adding one-fifteenth of GDP to the debt with such deficits exceeding a trillion dollars.

If the enforcement of ObamaCare is going to convince employers they need to cut back on employees, then they seemed destined to reduce profits. Profits mean taxes. Taxes mean federal and state and local revenue. Less revenue means either more debt or, heaven forfend, less government.

Ruining the economy is not the way to shrink government.

But shrinking government may be the only way to improve the economy.

That is easy to say. But the cost in money and in effort is huge. Huge doesn’t really convey just how immense, enormous, gigantic, gargantuan, humongous a problem lies before the country, its citizens, its seemingly incapable government, the one that got us into this chasm in the first place. Even if policies are adopted that grow the economy can they be good enough to generate enough hope for eventual governmental solvency?

Hope won’t do that. And change has yet to be demonstrated.