fearlesshistory

Watching the debates last night, I was struck by the money amounts that the candidates were tossing around; 3 million for a projector in a Chicago planetarium, 10 billion dollars in Iraq a month, 700 billion dollars to bail out the financial industry. But, what does this all mean? What does it mean to spend, say, a billion dollars?

I did some basic math. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you spent $1 every second.

60 seconds in every minute x
60 minutes in every hour x
24 hours every day
_______________________________
$86,400 a day. x
7 days a week.
_______________________________
$604,800 in a week x
52 weeks in a year
_______________________________
$31,449,600 a year x
10 years in a decade
_______________________________
$314,496,000 a decade x
10 decades in a century
_______________________________
$3,144,960,000 a century x (3 BILLION)
10 centuries in every millenium
_______________________________
$31,449,600,000 in a Millenium x
10 milleniums
________________________________
$314,496,000,000 in ten Millenia x
2.25 (to get close to 700 Billion)
________________________________
$707,616,000,000 (YAY, 700 Billion!) and it only took 22,500 years to do it!

For comparison,

Est. Americna’s life expectancy: 77.6 years
Est. Age of the United States: 231 years
Est. Age of the Magna Carta: 793 years
Est. Age of Islam: 1,375 years
Est. Age of Christianity: 2,008 years
Est. Age of the Great Pyramid at Giza: 5,008 years
Est. Age of Judaism: 5,768.
Neanderthals were estimated to have gone extinct 30,000 years ago.And,

In related news, AIG executives, immediately after receiving 81 Billion…sorry, about 2,700 YEARS worth of our tax dollars, spend $440,000 on a Spa vacation for it’s top executives in order to, get this “Retain the top talent” they need to “guide them through this economic crisis” - well, now that they put it that way…..

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