PotshotsMonday night, 15 September 2008 I’ve been pondering the Lipstick Paradox for a few days now. Forget the pig, somebody's trying to put lipstick on an elephant .... |
Thinking it over ...Read on for a reflection on life and events, as the spirit moves me Weighing in on the financial bail-out By Félix Alfonso Peña
Seven hundred billion dollars — that’s the figure being bandied about for the financial rescue package that will show off Uncle Sam’s financial acumen. You have to hand it our uncle — who else would be smart enough to buy into only businesses that are failing?
Still, I have to give President Bush credit for improvement. When Saudi Arabians led by an organization headquartered in Afghanistan attacked us, he wound up charging into Iraq to keep us safe. At least this time he’s not reacting by sending the money to Indonesia, Belize or some other part of the developing world.
Perhaps the Bush administration should reframe subprime mortgage financial debacle, which like 9/11 also happened under their watch, as the neutralization of hidden weapons of financial mass destruction.
Regardless, they have to do something before CEOs start throwing themselves off high-rises and their golden parachutes get all tangled up with one another. Considering the American public’s mood, they can’t be trusted to catch the falling CEOs with anything less than a pitchfork.
If it weren’t for the fact that we’re paying to save their hides, many of us would get more than a little satisfaction from hearing the same stuffed shirts who for years dutifully intoned, “The government can’t do anything right,” now all but rending their garments and beseeching the government to set things aright.
But the sheer notion of $700 billion begs to be fully written out so that we can grasp its immensity. In America, we call one thousand million a billion. To most of the world it’s really seven hundred thousand million dollars, but it’s still written out as $700,000,000,000. All those zeros are important. Each one nudges us ten times deeper into debt. If you wish, and assuming you have sufficient respect for the powers of 10, think of it as 10 to the 11th power times 7.
But how much is that, really? Well, if the treasury printed $1,000,000 bills, it would take 700,000 of them to make $700,000,000,000. That’s serious money, which is why I’m forgoing the typical shortcut of writing it out as $700 billion. I want to help my readers grasp its immensity.
But to give people something they can relate to, I’ll use something we all understand because we see it virtually every day: the $1 bill.
If you started counting out $700,000,000,000 in dollar bills at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take 22,181.66 years until the last bill is slapped down on the table, counting leap years. So if you start counting out the bills with the first second of 1 January 2008, you should be done, as near as I can figure, at 9:36 p.m. on 29 August 24190. I may be wrong, but I likely won’t be around to take the heat when the last bill is counted.
How high would a stack of $700,000,000,000 $1 bills go? I’m going to assume zero gravity, in accordance with the tone of this column, because otherwise the bills at the bottom would be significantly compressed by the weight — see below — of the bills above them. Assuming that the data from factmonster.com is correct, each bill is 0.0043 inches thick, so the stack would be about 47,506.3131 miles high. Not nearly enough to reach the moon, but well beyond where one can breathe, which is moot because the amount has already left us breathless.
What if we laid the bills side by side, like a carpet? By my calculation they would cover 402,382.49 square miles, an area about twice the size of Spain or a little smaller than Colombia. Laid end to end, the dollar bills would stretch 402,382.49 miles. That’s enough to circle the earth 16 times at the equator, with plenty left over to reward yourself handsomely for the effort.
How much would $700,000,000,000 in $1 bills weigh? Still relying on factmonster.com, this time for the weight — 490 notes per pound, 2,040.8 lbs. per $1,000,000 — I figure the $700,000,000,000 would weigh 1,428,560,000 pounds. Knock one zero off that if you use $10 bills, two zeros for $100. Hefty, no matter how you slice it.
And we all get to be a part of it! That $700,000,000,000 breaks down to $2,293.28 for each of the 305,239,639 persons living in our country, based on the U.S. Census population clock estimate at 5:19 Greenwich Mean Time on 24 September 2008.
But what’s the diff? We already owe $10 trillion or so. I’ll let you do the math on that one. |