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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (291039)	2/5/2009 1:01:40 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793897

Thickness of a $1000 bill 0.0043 inch number of $1000 bills in a pile one inch high 233 Number of $1000 bills in a pile a foot high 2791 Number of feet in a mile 5280 Value of a pile of $1000 bills a mile high $14,734,883,721 Height of a stack of $1000 bills totalling one trillion dollars 68 miles Height of the Space Shuttle Orbit 200 miles Value of a stack of $1000 bills from the earth to the Shuttle $2.9 trillion dollars Heck talk about tethered satellites! If congress doesn't get itself under control we will just scuttle the shuttle and climb up the stimulus package.

To: TimF who wrote (291039)	2/5/2009 3:41:33 PM
From: Bald Eagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793897

I understand that, but in terms of how it will affect our personal lives is what I meant. The government is about to unleash an extra trillion dollars, so how will that affect me in terms I can understand.

To: TimF who wrote (291039)	2/6/2009 1:00:11 AM
From: Neeka	Respond to of 793897

February 4, 2009, 6:14 pm How Much Is $900 Billion? Try Spending It $1 Million at a Time Putting large numbers into context is a frequent challenge for politicians and economists. Republicans opposed to the Obama administration's proposed stimulus program are marshaling some novel numerical comparisons to make the case that the roughly $900 billion spending package is too big. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion." To check that claim precisely, you'd need to know the exact day that Christ was born, and religious scholars aren't sure. Some scholars put the date somewhere around 4 or 5 B.C. (That Christ may have been born Before Christ is one argument for replacing B.C. with B.C.E., for Before Common Era.) PolitiFact used the year 4 B.C. to estimate that Christ was born 2012 years ago, since the Christian dating system eschews a year 0 — 1 A.D. followed on the heels of 1 B.C. Even then, the total would come to just $734 billion if you ignore leap years, closer to $735 billion if you don't — a more sensible approach, since the leap day was introduced before Christ. Either way, Sen. McConnell is right — the total isn't as big as the price tag attached to the stimulus package. The precise size keeps changing, but if you set it at $900 billion, the Christ-dated spending spree wouldn't get there for another 452 years or so. All these calculations, of course, posit that dollars have existed for over 2,000 years. Alternatively, McConnell might have said that if you spent $10 million for every day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, you still wouldn't reach $1 trillion, which is also true — I get to about $850 billion. These calculations also imply the dollar has remained at constant value, though $1 in 1913 was worth $21.46 last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Senator John Thune of South Dakota used a visual comparison, saying that you could circle the equator 38.9 times with $1 trillion in $100 dollar bills placed side by side. Each bill is 6.14 inches long, so a rope of 10 billion bills would be more than 969,000 miles long. The circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,902 miles. So the calculation checks out. Technically, each ring of bills has a thickness — 0.0043 inches — so each successive ring would have to be a bit bigger. But the difference is negligible. blogs.wsj.com