Holy Cow!

How Much Is $1.1 Trillion?

Amanda Shaw collects the numbers on the price tag for the new "stimulus" plan:

Adjusted for inflation, here are some other massive expenditures:

• * The Marshall Plan ($115.3 billion)
• * The space race ($237 billion)
• * The Korean War ($454 billion)
• * The New Deal ($500 billion)
• * The invasion of Iraq ($597 billion)
• * The Vietnam War ($698 billion)

So the proposed "stimulus" package costs more than the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and the New Deal combined.

Here are some thought experiments:

• If you took collected a $1 million per day, ever day from the birth of Christ, in 2009 you'd only be about 3/4 of the way to a trillion.
• If you got $1 every second, it would take almost 32,000 years to get to a trillion.
• If you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of each other, it would go 68,000 miles into space--1/3 of the way to the moon.
• If you took 100-dollar bills and put them side to side, it would circle the equator 38.9 times
  

To make things worse, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is saying that the stimulus plan will actually make things worse long-term.

HT: James Grant via Dustin Shramek

Update: Comparison with previous expenditures fixed. Sorry about that.

posted by JT at Thursday, February 05, 2009