I was helping our 12 year-old son Jeremy with his homework this evening. His topic for American History was Seward’s Folly.
Jeremy asked who Seward was, what a folly meant, and what was so important about his folly?
For us grown-ups who were not lucky enough to have the Internet or Google when we were kids, I’ll provide a refresher.
William H. Seward was a Governor of New York, U.S. Senator, and the Secretary of State serving under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Seward, on behalf of the United States, negotiated a deal to purchase what is now the State of Alaska. In 1867, the U.S. purchased what was assumed to be totally worthless land from a cash-strapped Russia for $7.2 million. That was a lot of money back then. It still is.
We added geography and a little simple arithmetic to the history lesson. The area of Alaska is 586,412 square miles. There are 640 acres in a square mile. So the total area of Alaska is 375.3 million acres. We’ll start using the zeros to get the full impact of the values. $7,200,000 divided by 375,303,680 acres equals .019184464. That means we paid a little less than 2 cents per acre for the entire State of Alaska!
If you like Sarah Palin, polar bears and caribou, and having oil to run the generators that provide most of the electricity we need to charge our hybrid cars and iPods, then you’ll agree that we got a pretty good bang for our bucks (all 7.2 million of them), though they didn’t think so back then.
Next, we decided to have a little fun and inject some science, civics, and economics into our little homework lesson. We tried to figure out how much land we could buy at 2 cents an acre with…um, let’s see…how about with an amount equal to our National Debt. As of three minutes ago, the National Debt was a little over $12 trillion (that is a 12 with 12 zeros behind it – $12,000,000,000,000.00). Incidentally, that adds up to $39,900 in debt for every man, woman, and child in the United States…all 307.7 million of us!
Uh oh! Now the math isn’t nearly as simple. $12 trillion multiplied times 2 cents equals 600,000,000,000,000 or 6 x 10 to the 14th power. Okay, so now we can buy 600 trillion acres.
We sharpened the pencils and went to work. We discovered that we could not only afford the total area of Alaska, we could afford the total land area of every continent on Earth. And if we counted the oceans, we could afford the total surface area of the Earth with dollars to spare. In fact, the total cost would be what seems now a paltry sum of $2.5 billion.
So we jumped into our imaginary space ship and went to do a little planet shopping. We discovered Mercury, being so small, was a bargain. It would only cost us $369 million. We circled back to Venus. A steal at $2.3 billion. We were on a roll. Mars went for under $1.2 billion.
Not so fast. Here comes Jupiter. It’s huge! It’s sure to break the bank. We crunched the numbers. It didn’t seem right. We punched in the numbers again, and again. It was doable. It would cost us $297.4 billion, but what the heck…it’s not our money!
We pressed on to Saturn. Writing checks with other people’s money was too easy. We spun around the rings and left behind $215 billion…chump change! Neptune -- $37.8 billion, Uranus – $40.1 billion, and Pluto (which we now know is not a planet, but what the heck) cost only $82 million.
We did it! We cruised the entire solar system and discovered that for the same price per acre Secretary Seward paid for Alaska back in 1867, we could purchase the total surface area of every planet. So we did it again…and again…and again. The amount equal to our National Debt of $12 trillion would be enough to purchase all the planets not twice, not three times, not four times…but TWENTY TIMES!
“That’s great!” exclaimed Jeremy. Not so fast I told him. That $12 trillion belongs to someone else. He asked whom. I replied that we owed China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Korea, UAE, Germany, France, etc. The list goes on and on. “Who owes the money?” I told him we all do. “Even me?” Yes son, even you. “How much?” About $40,000 a piece. “Do I have $40,000?” No you don’t. “Do you?” Well, we have some, but that money is for your future and for your mom’s and my retirement? “That sucks!” Don’t say sucks Jeremy, but yes it does. “What are we going to do?”
What are we going to do? The answer is as clear. We either let them continue to borrow money we can never repay, which will destroy our economy, our nation, and our very way of life, or we stop them. “How do we stop them?” We are trying little fella. For your mom, Josh, Su Jin, and you, we are going to try. For your children and grandchildren, we are going to try. We are going to try hard.