Just how big is the 700 billion requested by Bushco?

[sakura]

I find it hard to imagine a sum of money (or anything!) so large, so I've been looking around for comparisons to help me put it into perspective. Here goes:

700 billion dollars bills, stacked neatly into a pile 125 feet long and 200 feet wide, would rise to a height of 1000 feet. That's about the same height as NY's Chrysler building (1046 feet) On the other hand, if I were to stack dollar bills neatly into my two-story, 2000 square foot home (which has mortgage debt that is unlikely to be bailed out any time soon), I would be done by the time I got to 630 million. So I would need to fill up about 1100 houses of that size to get to 700 billion dollars. That's a fairly large neighborhood.

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/


Our nation's Gross Domestic Product, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is 14,143 billion dollars. 700 billion dollars is therefore approximately 4.9% of our GDP-- nearly 5% of our yearly output of goods and services.

http://www.ombwatch.org/article/blogs/entry/4545/45

The federal budget Bush has already requested for the coming fiscal year has a record cost of 3.1 trillion. That's 3100 billion. So a bailout of 700 billion for the nation's failing financial institutions is 23% of what our spendthrift president was already planning to spend next year.

Bush sought 515.4 billion for the defense department for next year. The financial bailout will therefore cost significantly more than it costs to run the world's largest army and supply it with state of the art weaponry.

Bush sought 59.2 for education for the coming fiscal year. So the financial bailout will cost almost 12 times more than Bush is planning to put toward educating our kids.

The proposed 2009 has 408 billion set aside for "mandatory spending" on medicare. So the financial bailout will cost 1.7 times as much as the government spends on health care for seniors each year.

And only 6.9 billion has been requested for the National Science Foundation. So paying for the irresponsible decisions made by the "too big to fail" financial giants will cost more than 101 times what we set aside for basic scientific research each year through this agency.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/browse.html

Does anyone have any other comparisons to share?

[KT2000]

1. No other comparisons

but that is interesting info.

[sakura]

2. One more...

700 billion dollar bills would cover an area of 2615.5 square miles, or 51 miles long by 51 miles wide. That's over eight and one-half times the size of the city of New York (all five boroughs), or five times the size of Los Angeles.

[unhappycamper]

3. 700 billion would continue the occupations for 83.3 years. n/t