Saturday, February 7, 2009

What Could You Buy with 1 Trillion Dollars?

I read an article by Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council. He was noting that the CBO estimates that the Senate version of the so-called stimulus plan will top at least $1.1 trillion. Like most of us, he was looking for a way to get his mind around that sum of money. Here are some of his interesting perspectives:

Some examples:

  • If you stack up $1,000 bills, $1 trillion would need a pile that is 80 miles high.

  • $ 1 trillion is more than the combined gross revenues of Wal Mart, Exxon, General Motors and Ford Motors.

  • 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.

  • You could buy a thousand Queen Mary 2 with accommodations for 2,620 passengers

  • With a population of approximately 300 million people, you could give away $1 trillion by giving every man, woman and child in the U.S. $ 3,400 each.

  • We could buy everyone on Earth an iPod.

  • We could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with 23.5-karat gold leaf.

  • We could buy 16.6 million Habitat for Humanity houses

  • We could hire 1.9 million additional teachers

  • He also came up with this combined shopping list:

You could buy:8,700 Porsche 911 Turbos ($126,000 each): $1,097,940,000New York Yankees: $1,200,000,000New York Mets: $482,000,000Every NFL Franchise: $8,600,000,000Dracula's Romanian castle: $140,000,0001,000 60SE Lear jets ($11,595,000 each): $11,595,000,000Denver International Airport: $4,822,000,00010 Picasso's (113,400,000 each): $1,134,000,000Hard Rock Casino in Vegas: $770,000,000Hong Kong Disneyland: $3,500,000,000South Pacific Island of Katafanga: $38,900,000Buy the whole world 100 cans of Coke: $650,000,000,000Buy 50 Super bowl ads ($2,600,000 each): $130,000,000 Build 1,001 Habitat for Humanity houses (at $60,000 each): $600,060,000Build 2,000 miles of Metro rail ($150,000,000 per a mile of track): $300,000,000,000Build 250 hospitals in Third World nations ($41,300,000 each): $10,325,000,000Produce your own Hollywood movie: $150,000,000Buy the Maltese Falcon, the world's most expensive yacht: $100,000,000Buy 2 Napa Valley wineries ($34,000,000 each): $68,000,000Buy 26 McDonalds' franchises ($1,000,000 each): $26,000,000


Total: $1,000,000,000,000

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