Fwd: Tony Ciccarone -- do the math!

Laer at Cheat-Seeking Missiles writes:

I don't know who Tony Ciccarone is, but I like his alternative bailout plan.  Too bad no one listened.

The Tony Ciccarone bailout Plan

I'm against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG.

Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a We Deserve It Dividend.

To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.

Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend.

*ahem*

You (and Tony) are off by a factor of $1000.  Each person gets $425.

It's easy to lose track when doing math on numbers with lots and lots of zeros.  Let's use scientific notation.

$85,000,000,000 is 85 * 10^9 or 85e9

(The "^" means "raised to the power of", or "multiplied by itself that number of times."  So 10 to the ninth power means ten times itself nine times -- one billion. Another way to think of it is, "how many zeros after the decimal point".)

200,000,000 is 200 * 10^6 or 2 * 10^8 (2e8)

Dividing 200 million into 85 billion gives us 85e9 ÷ 2e8. 

Take the part before "e":  85÷2 = 42.5

The numbers after the "e" are exponents.  When dividing exponents, you subtract the numbers.

[anything]e9 ÷ [anything]e8 = [something]e1. 

In this case, [something] is 42.5.  42.5e1 is the same as 42.5 * 10^1; 10^1 = 10.

42.5 * 10 = 425.

Less than the "stimulus check" earlier this year.