Every week you read about federal spending on projects that cost billions or trillions of dollars.  You know that you contribute to that amount when you pay your taxes, but most people don’t have any idea how much they are paying for that bank bailout or new weapon system. Figuring this out is about as easy as calculating a tip on a dinner check. All you need to know is your SOB factor (Share of a Billion).

To calculate the SOB all you need to know is how much your tax bill was for 2014.  It doesn’t matter if you got a refund or had to pay. What matters is the number on line 24 of form 1040 (2024 version). This is your ‘total tax’ for the year.  Once you have your total tax number, get out a calculator and divide it by 4,900 – which is roughly how many billions the US collected in 2024.   The result is your share of every billion dollars the government spends (including the amounts they borrow to pay).

So say Joe’s tax for 2024 was $24,500 and he divides it by 4,900 to get about $5. This is his SOB factor.  The next time he hears about a 100 billion expenditure he knows that he paid $5 for every billion spent, or a total of $500 for that one expenditure.  And what about a trillion dollar expenditure?  A trillion is one thousand times a billion so Joe’s SOT (Share of a trillion) is one thousand times his SOB or $5,000 for each trillion.  Every time the Federal Government spends $1 trillion, Joe’s share of that is $5,000. Joe can now decide if this particular expenditure is worth his $5,000.