March 25, 2009

How much is ten trillion dollars? (updated)

By John Walker

The mind boggles at the size of the debt President Obama will foist upon Americans if his spending plans are realized. These funds, your tax money, and that of all your future tax-paying family, will be seized and given to parties approved by the President and Congress.

What if, instead, President Obama decided to charter some Boeing 747s and fly over the population, shoveling out the ten trillion dollars in $20 bills? How many Boeing 747s would that take? B747-400F

One million dollars in $20 bills weighs approximately 110 pounds. Then:

$ 1,000,000 weighs 110 pounds,

$ 1,000,000,000 weighs 110,000 pounds,

$ 1,000,000,000,000 weighs 110,000,000 pounds,

$ 10,000,000,000,000 weighs 1,100,000,000 pounds.

A fully-fueled 747-400 has a take-off cargo capacity of approximately 266,000 pounds.

Therefore, it would take 4,135 Boeing 747s to dump ten Trillion dollars over the population.

Can you fathom this? Visualize loading 4,135 of the 747s with $20 bills and shoveling it out.

There have only been 1412 Boeing 747s built as of February 2009 according to Wikipedia.

Does the government think that you are that stupid to accept this? Are you thinking? How does this work for you? Are you angry yet?

Update:

William C. Schwerin writes:

You could actually cover Delaware with $20 bills. Here's the math:

A $20 bill is ~6.6cm x 15.65cm = 103.3 sq.cm = 0.01033 sq.meters.

There are 500-billion $20-bill in $10-trillion; enough to cover 5.165-billion sq. meters.

The area of the state of Delaware is ~1954 sq. miles or 5.06-billion sq. meters.

So, subtracting the area of Delaware from the area covered by $10-trillion still leaves us with enough $20-bills to cover 105-million sq. meters.

105-million sq. meters divided by 0.01033 sq. meters per $20 gives us "only" 10.17-billion $20-bills or $203-billion (give or take a bit of round-off).

I first thought of paving Cook County, here in Illinois, but this could "only" use $8.2-trillion.

Repaving Delaware might not be a bad use for the $$....think what it would do for tourism.

Repaving Cook County might not be a bad idea either but it probably wouldn't lower our local taxes.

Another use might be to simply give a check to every person living in the US for $329,000. But then, we probably wouldn't spend it wisely.