“If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to [God’s] service you could not give him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.” – C.S. Lewis

Of course, if you’ve been paying any attention, modern progressive economics operates according to the view that you can borrow trillions, give billions away to those you’ve obligated to repay the borrowed trillions, and the suckers beneficiaries should believe they’re “billions to the good on the transaction”.

When the row of zeros in a dollar figure becomes long enough, I think people stop having a sense for what is actually happening. Whether nine zeroes or twelve zeroes, as Dolores Umbridge Hillary Clinton once asked, “What difference at this point does it make?”.

We will discover, in due time of course, that the number of zeroes actually made a lot of difference, and that the billions in “benefits” amounted to a mess of pottage.