<p>Most of us Conservatives are pretty good at math, but I doubt there’s a single one of us who ever had to use “quadrillion” in a sentence, in either its word form or <em>number</em> form. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it on <em>Jeopardy.</em></p>
<p>I therefore didn’t feel too stupid or embarrassed having to look it up, to learn at this late stage of my life that a quadrillion is a “1” followed by fifteen zeroes.</p>
<p>A “1” I can understand. I can understand 15 zeroes. But I can’t understand a “1” <em>followed</em> by 15 zeroes, all in a <em>row,</em> with no <em>spaces</em> between them, and I don’t think my 6th Grade math teacher Mrs. Stein would understand it either. This kind of number takes you out of math class and down the hall into creative writing, astronomy, physics, or philosophy.</p>
<p>Today’s Democratic candidates don’t know what a quadrillion means either, let alone what <em>lots </em>of quadrillions mean, but that’s how much they want to spend to Save Mother Earth, without even the safety net of a Save Mother Earth Money-Back Guarantee.</p>
<p>A recently released study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Power The Future (PTF) took a real look at the costs of the Green New Deal, unlike the nuts supporting it who didn’t look at <em>any</em> data. (That takes too much work and facts get in the way of their fantasies.) The CEI/PTF looked at five states: Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, chosen to represent an American crossroads and diversity of individual state economies, industries, populations, transportation needs, climates, etc., representing the nation as a whole.</p>
<p>For purposes of this blog, we’re only going to look at two of the states at different ends of the costs scale, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, because enough’s enough.</p>
<p>The <em>initial</em> cost to retrofit every building, all machinery and transportation systems in New Hampshire to get in compliance with proposed Green New Deal regulations is $102.8 trillion. Almost seems like a bargain, until you consider that New Hampshire only has 1.35 million residents.</p>
<p>For Pennsylvania, with 12.8 million fine folks (nine times the population of New Hampshire’s), the cost is $2,000,000,000,000,000. And if you weren’t paying attention above, this means two quadrillion. (Fifteen zeroes, remember?)</p>
<p>And if that doesn&#8217;t blow you away, let me hit you with this:</p>
<p><em>A QUADRILLION DOLLARS IS 250 TIMES THE CURRENT FEDERAL BUDGET! </em></p>
<p><em>A QUADRILLION DOLLARS IS MORE THAN TEN TIMES THE TOTAL WORLD OUTPUT FOR A YEAR!</em></p>
<p>If these numbers confuse you, let me translate them into figures that normal people like you and me can better understand. For the average household in the five states studied, the cost of the Green New Deal would cost $70,000 in the first year, followed by $45,000 each and every year for the next two to five years, give or take an additional $25,000 or so for each of the few following years after that.</p>
<p>Do you feel better now that you can better understand the numbers? Are you getting your checkbook ready? By the way:</p>
<p>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Green New Deal supporters estimate the total nationwide cost…all 50 states combined…<em>at a hilariously low $1.7 trillion over ten years.</em> This represents a pretty significant variance in cost estimates, as you can plainly see, and call me crazy, but:</p>
<p>I trust the CEI/PTF study figures a lot more than I trust AOC’s, who came up with <em>her</em> numbers on a cocktail napkin while mixing a mojito, or Bernie Sanders’, who calculated his while indisposed after an overdose of Ex-Lax. Also, how did they do it in the first place, because even the latest generation iPhone’s calculator tops out at only 999,999,999!</p>
<p>Until even fairly recently, when the pundits discussed budgets that when into the millions, only when it went into the billions did they joke, “Well, now you’re talking <em>real </em>money.” It seems the Dems now want to take us much higher than that with their spending. As Buzz Lightyear would say, “To quadrillions and beyond!”</p>
<p>This Green New Deal folly has most of us laughing all the way to the Trump check box, lever, or chad, but when you think about it, it’s not all that funny. Things aren’t getting done because we’re wasting too much time discussing this foolishness.</p>
<p>And if this isn’t reason enough to vote for Trump in 2020, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 others.</p>