DIANE MAKAR MURPHY Any way you stack it, $87 billion is a lot of money
Eighty-seven billion dollars. Eighty-seven billion.
Of course, that's the amount of U.S. tax dollars that will likely make its way across the Atlantic to our new friends in Iraq. It's a monumental figure to everyone but those in Washington, D.C.
One radio show host has been calling it 8,700 million, which puts it into a little perspective. Even at that, you might have trouble imagining.
Let's see if I can help. If you took 87 billion dollar bills and stacked them into a neat pile, you could compare the height of your money tower to the tallest building in the world -- the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taiwan. Well, kind of. Actually, you could stack 18,768 Taipei 101's one on top of the other to match your $87 billion tower.
Or, consider this
If that's still too effuse, consider laying your dollars end to end. Your dollar belt would stretch around the earth at its center 337.23 times.
If you laid them out like little George Washington floor tiles, you would cover the state of Ohio and a fifth of Pennsylvania.
But, of course, no one wants to wallpaper with money; we want to spend it.
So, let's convert those dollars to thousand dollar bills, just for yucks. If I brought the money to you, packed in a massive money train, and told you to spend one $1,000 bill a day, it would take you and your ancestors 50,010 years to do it (assuming you kept it in a very large bag under your bed and didn't draw any interest).
Well, that's certainly ridiculous. The earth might not even be around in 50,010 years. The fact is, a million dollar a day spending spree makes more sense. Go ahead, take the next 87 years to shop.
And what might you buy? Teachers come to mind. With $87 billion we could hire 1,959,459 teachers for a year, based on a teacher's average salary. Better yet, we could hire 78,000, and keep them on through retirement.
Or we could hire 2,416,666 police officers for a year, or 120,800 for 20 years, or 96,600 for a full 25 years.
Or, using figures based on Canada's cost of national health care per capita, we could provide the 10.6 million children in America who don't have health insurance with coverage for almost 21/2 years.
Tomorrow's problems
Perhaps that's not your idea of really fixing a problem. Perhaps you think what we need are solutions to tomorrow's problems.
Then, look at it this way: $87 billion would pay for four years of room, board, fees, books and tuition for 573,454 students at Harvard.
Nonetheless, some might not think that that's all that much money. After all, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates could nearly fund the entire $87 billion themselves ($46 billion from Bill, $36 billion from Warren).
But, to me, that represents about 171/2 million years of my annual income tax payments. It's 73,109,243,697 boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
It's enough to make 8,700 poor Americans millionaires, or to launch the small businesses of 87,000 others. It's enough to wipe out the deficits of all 50 states. That's right; it's enough to do that.
Well, the poor dears in Washington; you can hardly blame them. Why, they're absolutely awash in zeros on Capitol Hill, as in 87 - zero, zero, zero; zero, zero, zero; zero, zero, zero.
Billions and billions
The federal government gave $278 billion to the Defense Department last year, just for its domestic spending. It gave out $613 billion in direct retirement and disability payments. Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare were funded to the tune of $890 billion.
A little visit to the U.S. Census Bureau Web site (from which I gleaned many of my statistics) revealed that in March 2002 alone, the federal government paid $11,599,033,843 in payroll to its civilian employees. Why, the Congress people, active and retired, are taking home annual salaries and pensions of more than $101,000,000.
What does it all mean? Well, I'm not sure I know exactly. Just something to think about ...
murphy@vindy.com