A Modest Proposal

I believe that Americans (as well as everyone else in the world) are incapable of relating to the size of the various sums of money that are tossed about in the media on a constant basis.

One minute a $100 million reserch project is denounced and in the next a trillion dollar bailout is discussed.

So what I propose is that every year the government publish on some arbitraty date what the average population of the United States is expected to be for that year. This number would be used by news organizations and government agencies and others to normalize all the big numbers. For example, let's say the average population is expected to be about 300 million people. Then an expenditure of a million dollars could be additionally characterized as a third of a cent per person. A billion becomes $3.33 per person and a trillion becomes $3333 per person.

I think that this might help put things into a better perspective than the incomprehensible numbers used today.