What Eight Hundred Billion Dollars Looks Like
Different organizations have put forth different suggestions for the 2008 word-of-the-year, including change, bailout, overshare, and hypermiling.
My suggestion for 2008 word-of-the-year?
Billion.
Once unfathomably large, we now toss around billion with conversational ease. Billion is in the news a lot more, too.
My kids were listening to the proposed stimulus package being discussed on the radio.
They asked me what $800B looked like.
Hmm.
The familar buck.
One hundred dollars.
Ten thousand dollars.
One million dollars, below.
This is one hundred million dollars.
Ten billion dollars here.
One hundred billion dollars. Each tiny pink box is a hundred mil.
And eight of those. Here’s eight hundred billion dollars.
I think I got that right. Hard not to drop a zero.
Every $100B expenditure works out to $330 dollars per citizen — each man, woman, child, and baby. So my pro-rata portion of the proposed $800b stimulus plan is about $2,650.
Yours, too.
Me, wife, and two kids: $10,600.
$800B is the stimulus plan. I’m not counting the $700B TARP — another $9300 obligation for my family — because there’s a chance the Treasury gets the money back, or even turns profit on it. Also not counting the Detroit bailout.
My head spins.
Alan Rimm-KaufmanAlan Rimm-Kaufman founded the Rimm-Kaufman Group...
Heard an interesting discussion on “wrapping your head around huge numbers” this morning on NPR.
The takeaway: it’s an amazingly huge number, but it’s only about 5% of GDP.
Also, isn’t $2,650 is Per Capita, not pro rata?
Yes, per citizen — using pro rata and per capita as synonymous.
$800 billion is perhaps “only” 5% of GDP, but it exceeds all of the federal government’s other (individual) outlays. According to the GAO, 2007 spending on Social Security was $626 billion; Medicare and Medicaid, $556 billion; even the DoD got a comparatively paltry $665 billion.
Total government revenue totaled $2.6 trillion, so $800 billion represents 31% of receipts.
Think about this:
A Million dollars fits into a nice briefcase.
A Billion is 1000 Million, so it takes 10 Million $100 Bills to make a Billion. That would fully load 12 shipping pallets with hundred dollar bills.
A Billion is 1/1000 of a Trillion.
We’re about to have Trillion Dollar ANNUAL deficits 10 years out, yet the only thing they can find “worthy” of budget cuts is DEFENSE? This in a post 9/11 world where Iran and North Korea will both be nuclear VERY soon.
Scared yet?`