‹ Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue •
I think I saw a movie about this. A man is suing Bank of America for 1,784 billion trillion dollars in an apparent dispute over customer service. Given who the defendant is, I find the plaintiff rather sympathetic and his claim eminently credible. People are scoffing at the amount of damages, however, and the federal judge is rather annoyed at the plaintiff. I see what the plaintiff is doing, though. Civil litigation takes years to judgment, especially once Bank of America sends forth its phalanx of starving Big Law associates. If the matter takes ten years, the plaintiff is simply calculating the amount of damages in 2019 dollars. After eight years of deficit-fueled Obamanomics, the sum demanded actually is about $75,001 dollars in current dollars, the minimum jurisdictional amount to get him into federal court in this case. That also explains his other claim for $200 million. That’s to pay the postage to mail documents in the case.
For the lawyers, if this survives a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, what is the suit’s settlement value? If there is just a trillionth of a percent chance that a jury would agree with the plaintiff, that’s still $17.84 billion. Or do numbers of this order simply lose all meaning to resolve such mundane matters, like ordinary units of measurement for astronomical distances do?
In related news, the 2009 federal deficit has ballooned to nearly 1.5 trillion dollars.
“The facts of life are conservative.” - Margaret Thatcher
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