Fun with Numbers: the budget deficit

some mind-bending calculations regarding the current year’s budget deficit. i’m no economist, and don’t get me wrong, i’m not terribly conservative… but you’ve got to admire the magnitude here.

“the current us deficit is $1.7 trillion. think of it this way: if you stacked $100 bills the same height as the sears tower (1450 feet), you would need 4,769 stacks to equal the debt that our country is currently in.
or here’s another one… if you take the $1.7 trillion that the us gov’t is in debt, again in $100 bills, and put it end to end instead of stacking it, you could go around the earth a little over 66x. or you could make 3 round trips to the moon and then go around the earth almost 9x as well.”

i personally checked these, and the sears tower one is a little off… it would actually be about 4,200 stacks, but still a lot. also, it would take light almost 9 seconds to travel the distance of the bills laid end to end.

and, this is only talking about this year’s deficit, the total national debt is close to 12 trillion, so you would need to multiply all these stats by 7 to account for that figure.

my solution… we need to come up with a denomination greater than the $100 bill, asap! we’ll never get it paid off this way! i’m thinking maybe something like a $100K bill, that way we could pay it off with only four and a half stacks as tall as the sears tower… still doesn’t fit in a briefcase, but definitely much more manageable. hahaha.

hmm, now to figure out what denomination of bill it would take to make the deficit fit into one standard-sized briefcase… boy, that would be easy, just handing someone one briefcase full of money… makes me feel less panicky. maybe we could even fool them, and underneath the top layer of bills the rest could just be newspaper.

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~ by blueeyedson on August 21, 2009.