Does America’s Conspicuous Consumption Equal - What Comes After A Trillion?

By Allen J Duffis
Published: August 16, 2005

     As I passed from adolescence to adulthood during the late 1950’s, there was in existence a popular television series called “The Millionaire”. This program revolved around the mysterious motivations of a fictitious character named John Beresford Tippton, a multimillionaire.

     Mr. Tippton, through the services of his male secretary, anonymously dispatched tax-free gifts of one million dollars to individuals he appeared to have choose at random. The show went on to deal with how this sudden wealth impacted the lives of these people. I mention this television series because in many ways, it has relevance to present times.

     Ever increasingly, the American public is being asked to digest daily exposure to astronomically increasing costs of government, defense, education and medical care. While at the same time, the larger than life earnings of individuals in the corporate and entertainment worlds give testament to the term ‘conspicuous consumption’.

     In the richest nation on Earth, this disparity in the distribution of wealth begs the question: Why so few with so much, and so many with so little?

     Since the beginning of the industrial revolution it has been well demonstrated, that people need time to become accustomed to any new standard of economic measurement affecting their daily lives, dreams and aspirations. Most importantly, however, to fully understand the real value of their own earning power in relation to that of others financially better off than themselves, they require a broad socially comprehendible common terminology.

     I say this because there are clear indications that the American public has already suffered severe confusion distinguishing between Million, Billion and Trillion.

     In point of fact, due to the inflation of real estate values, many Americans are technically millionaires, who are just a stone's throw (or paycheck) away from poverty or bankruptcy.

     So the average citizen does not relate well to the relationship these sums have to their everyday lives. Their ability to comprehend the comparative financial status of others in society, namely the ruling classes, decreases proportionally to the more frequent use of these overpowering monetary expressions. And in their wake, they tend to leave no clear understanding of their significance to the common man and woman. This in turn severely limits their ability to adequately apply constitutionally given citizen powers to control their own government.

     Inform the average citizen that someone is a Billionaire, and in their minds that translates to having ‘ a whole lot of millions of dollars’. In fact, the average high school graduate has difficulty expressing, even with paper and pencil, the sum of a billion dollars. How then can they be expected to comprehend the true meaning of such an amount?

     Just recently it has been revealed that the federal government owes the Social Security System 3.6 Trillion dollars. It naturally follows, based upon today’s soaring costs and the inflation factor, it is not unreasonable to expect that other areas of the country’s finances will also enter the Trillions arena.

     Therefore, it would seem expeditious to start considering what monetary expression we should next employ to express what comes after a Trillion. And it has to be one chosen or created to equal the general public’s well-established mastery of the previous guide mark, namely a Million.

     On my high school graduation day in 1957, I stood with classmate friends on the institution’s steps, smoking what was to be our last cigarette together, as we nervously planned a future get-together.

     What we agreed upon unanimously was that we were going to keep in touch (which we did for awhile), and when the first one of us earned one hundred dollars a week, we’d all get together for a dinner in celebration.

     Well sadly, that get-together never came about, but the planning was based on sound reasoning. For in 1957, $100 a week translated into $5,200 dollars a year, and upon achieving that earning level, one could get a Diners Club card; the nations first general public credit instrument.

     At the time, this was the accepted societal stepping-stone to affluence. And we all hoped and dreamed that the achievement of this first recognized earning benchmark would, eventually, lead to becoming a Millionaire.

     No one in the 1950’s thought of becoming a Billionaire or a Trillionaire. Such an astronomical state of wealth was unimaginable. But all Americans’, on every economic level, thoroughly understood the concept of being a Millionaire. Well, in the world of today’s’ finances, that meaning has been lost, possibly forever.

     The urgency for the establishment of a new guide mark, is to let ‘we the people’ know when we as a citizenry are paying too much for our government, services, wares and utilities; or to be more descriptive, being robbed blind. Simply consider the following:

     Why does higher education of our children, require them at graduation to be saddled with a debt equivalent to a 1960’s home mortgage? Why does the cost of an average American home, exceed that of the same 1950’s home by fifteen times or more? Why does the interest on a credit card exceed that which was in the 50’s and 60’s referred to as the crime of usury?

     When we compare what we, as citizens, have to pay to achieve a reasonably comfortable simple lifestyle (like our parents did in the 50’s and 60’s), the comparative costs pale in comparison to our earning power. So we are again moved to ask the following:

     Why do the average earnings of corporate CEO’s exceed that of their 1950’s brethren by as much as 210 percent? Why are energy costs so high, at a time when, by their own admission, these companies are posting record profits? How can a medical doctor (a share holder in a bank, a shopping mall and a health club) charge a construction worker – or his insurance company - for a kidney transplant as much as three times his patient’s average yearly earnings?

     In order for the common man and woman to fully understand these cost/earnings anomalies, they must have some sort of easily comprehendible financial mark or gauge to go by: and it has to come soon.

     For what we are discussing here is far more than overall cost of services and government, but rather government sanctioned organized greed on a massive scale. And in for the average citizen to be able to defend against these immoral incursions on their financial well-being, by their own society, they must first be able to fully understand – the numbers.