When Secretary Paulson announced the need for a massive 700 billion dollar bailout of the financial sector, it seemed like an immense amount of money. He said that the stability of the US financial institutions were at stake. The taxpayers trust, the treasure of our country, was offered as the stopgap. Congress passed legislation, pundits debated, and US citizens, on the advice of the “experts” (the same, for lack of alternatives with requisite experience, who facilitated the onslaught of the crisis), crossed their fingers and watched as the transfer of wealth began.
$700,000,000,000 is a large amount of money, but it is less than one fifth of an even larger number, $3,800,000,000,000. (Okay, AverageTodd, but what is the importance of that observation?) According to CNBC the tab for the current financial crisis is now $3.8 trillion (and growing). We haven’t spent, printed, or borrowed all of that money yet, but more and more is drafting out the door as we speak.
Big numbers and large scales have become increasingly meaningless to the average person. We hear these numbers thrown around all the time. It is difficult, however, to wrap our brains around millions, billions, and trillions. We work with averages, ratios, and smaller numbers much better.
Just for fun, let’s play some numbers games…
How much is 3.8 trillion?
The capacity of Fenway Park is listed at 36,108 people. You would have to fill the stadium 105 million times to reach total attendance of 3.8 trillion people.
The weight of any denomination of US paper currency is 1 gram. The weight of $3.8 trillion, in one dollar bills, is 8,377,572,797 pounds.
The current US population, as estimated by the Census Bureau, is approximately 305 million persons. If we all paid an equal share of the cost, we would each write a check for $12,459.02.
Federal Minimum Wage is currently $6.55 per hour. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 144,958,000 employed persons over the age of 16 in the United States. If all employed persons worked at this wage (full time), it would take 2 years to cover the bailout tab.
Growing each day at an alarming rate, the approximate cost to US taxpayers for the Iraq War (11/17/08) is over $600 billion. If operations ended today, we could fund six more of these conflicts, with money left over, for the same price as our financial rescue.
Copy paper has a thickness of about .1 millimeters. 3.8 trillion sheets would stack from the surface of the earth to the surface of the moon.
