I've spent the last several days trying to wrap my head around this enormous figure our congresscritters have just agreed to spend on a bill no one read in full before passing it- hard to do because I don't really have much of a reference for a million of anything, let alone a billion, so once you start talking hundreds of billions, how is the average person supposed to comprehend that number? Actually, I think "they" bank on our not comprehending it- it lets them get away with more and more spending with less and less accountability because we've lost perspective on just how big the number really is. But I digress- the point of today's post is to put this number into terms I can understand so here goes...
The first thing that came to mind is my favorite airplane- the F22 Raptor, the single greatest bit of flying machinery ever assembled in the world. The sound of an F22 flying past is one of the coolest things I've ever heard but that sound came with a hefty price tag, $137.5 million dollars a piece. Still a big number I can't quite wrap my head around, but I did figure out that you could buy 5725 F22s for the amount of money congress just mortgaged our future for. 5725 I can understand. If Lockheed Martin & Boeing turned out one of these planes a day it would take them over 15 years to fill the order.
In keeping with my aircraft theme, I gave the Harrier a run through, too. Probably the 2nd coolest sounding airplane I've ever year- that puppy will rattle your bones during the vertical take off and landings! At a price tag of around $35,000,000, our armed forces could order up 22,485 of 'em- at a rate of production of one per day, that would take just over 61 years to complete.
Still awfully large numbers and impractical expenditures so I took another approach- Lambeau Field... At capacity, the greatest football stadium on earth currently holds 72,928 people. I've been to Packer games and they're all sell outs so this seemed like a good reference point to me. Next trick was deciding what to use as examples, I decided on houses, cars and bread since all are things we can relate to.
First houses- the median price for a home in the US is around $230k. $787billion would buy 3,421,739 houses or approximately 47 houses PER PERSON at Lambeau field on any given home game. I can't keep one house clean so what the hell I'd do with 47 of them I don't know...
Cars- Using an average sticker price of $25,000, we're talking 31,480,000 cars. That means every man, woman and child in Lambeau field on game day could buy 431 cars and have some change left over for gas. If you drove each car for a week at a time, it would take over 8 years before you'd have to repeat the rotation
Bread- I like the good stuff, costs around $2.49 a loaf at the local grocery store. I can't imagine what 316,064,257,028 loaves of bread would look like but I do know that every single person in Lambeau would have to buy 159 loaves per day every day for 80 years in order to buy that much bread. If every man, woman and child in the United States were to buy 1 loaf of bread per day, it would take 2.85 years for us to buy that much bread. I dunno about anyone else but I don't have the freezer space to store that much!
Just for fun, I also looked at how much per day folks would have to spend before they hit the $787 billion of our money Congress signed away without ever reading the bill they passed. Again, using the crowd at Lambeau as my reference point, each and every single person at the game would have to spend $396.75 per day for the next 80 years. Somehow, I suspect 73,000 people spending $400 a day for the next 80 years would do our economy a lot more good than Congress spending it ever will...
