Federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a detailed accounting of money owed to American Indians, a bookkeeping task that would
"take 200 years."
One has to wonder how they arrived at that number, given that the actual shorting of money owed American Indians over the last 118 years was primarily done in an era before computers. Wouldn't this little bit of modern technology shorten this sort of accounting audit by some number of years short of 200? I mean, it took less time than that to actually cook the books to begin with. I bet they didn't mean it actually taking 200 years, but 200 man-years instead. They said it could cost $13 Billion to accomplish the task. That's $31,250 per man-hour. Even if they meant it literally taking 200 years to accomplish, $13 Billion would get you 1000 accountants working for 200 years at $65K per year each. If these numbers are what they used to decide this case, it's ridiculously absurd reasoning for disallowing a judgement. Perhaps it was just hyperbole. What place does hyperbole have in an appeals court decision?