How Much is $8.8 Trillion?

July 5, 2007 in Economics, George W. Bush, Money, The War, Trade Deficit

The U.S. deficit is $8.8 trillion ($8,800,000,000,000). How much is that, exactly?

Here are the stats for $1,000,000,000,000 – 1/2 of the estimated cost of the Iraq War and nearly 1/9th of the national deficit:

1. If you stack up $ 1,000 bills, $1 trillion would need a pile that is 80 miles high. (9 trillion = 720 miles – nearly the distance from San Francisco CA to Salt Lake City UT)

2. The entire expenditure of NASA over the last 40 years has been approx. $ 600 billion. (You would need to spend $1,000 a day for the last 1,000,000 days – more than 2700 years…every day since 700B.C. – to reach $1 billion; $600,000 a day for $600 billion; $1,000,000 a day to reach 1 trillion; and $9,000,000 – nine million dollars A DAY – to reach $9 trillion.)
3. $1 trillion exceeds the world’s total military expenditures for 2004

4. $1 trillion is more than the combined gross revenues (not profits…but sales) of Wal Mart plus Exxon plus General Motors plus Ford Motors.

5. Assuming the United States consumes about 17 billion barrels of oil a year and assuming the cost of a barrel of oil is about $ 65, a trillion dollars will buy an entire year’s worth of oil for the USA.

6. Want to own a cruise ship? Using your $1 trillion, buy yourself that little boat to sail the seas…the Queen Mary 2 with accommodations for 2,620 passengers (enough room for the whole family!) In fact, you could buy a thousand QM2s (share them with your friends!) and there would even be a little left over to pay the wages of the 1,250 crew members for each ship. (For your $9 trillion, you could get more than 5,000,000 Ferrari FXX race cars at $1,773,000 each.)

7. Feel like sharing the wealth? With a population of approximately 300 million people, you could give away your $1 trillion by giving every man, woman and child in the U.S. $3,400 each. Alternatively, you could give $ 38,500 to every Iraqi living in Iraq. (Using our $9 trillion dollar number – every man, woman and child in the U.S. would receive $30,000 each.)

8. Let’s say your working life is 40 years (from age 25 to age 65) and you work 40 hours a day (this should say “a week”), 52 weeks a year (you’re a workaholic and don’t take any vacations). If you earned $1 trillion during your working life, then you got paid $200,000 per minute. (If you earned $9 trillion, you got paid $1,800,000 per minute. Or, if your dad had gotten in on that internet “guaranteed cash machine” program on the day you were born, and you lived until your 75th birthday, you would have made nearly $230,000 per minute; each and every minute of your life.)

from The Galloping Beaver – the orange comments are ours at say-when

In the Federal Budget for fiscal year 2002, the Bush Administration estimated a $1.288 trillion surplus from 2001 to 2004. In the 2005 Mid-Session Review, it was changed to an $850 billion deficit.

End of economics lesson for the day. See – it’s not just the war.

Say “When.”