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The Selling of America

By Hobie Morris  Posted by Charles Sullivan (about the submitter)       (Page 2 of 3 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   No comments

Charles Sullivan
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For starters, if we laid one million dollar bills end to end it would extend 96.7 miles.

One billion dollar bills would extend 97,000 miles.

400 billion dollar bills would extend 38 million miles (1,600 times around Earth).

To take this further we'll use President Bush's $400 billion plus 2006 Defense Budget.

We know the length of that sum; how about the weight of his Defense Budget in dollar bills. It would weigh in at around 439,000 tons.

What if we had to transport that volume and tonnage?

By my calculations we could pack $63.5 million dollar bills in one 50' box car. At that rate we'd need 6,299 box cars (66 miles long) to move the stash from Brookfield to Washington, D. C. (Of course we could pack box cars with $100 dollar bills. We'd need only 63 fifty ft. cars for this job.)

Let's say your family income is $34,000 a year. You feel generous. You want to personally pay for this year's Defense Budget. If you gave every cent of your income you wouldn't be able to retire for 11.7 million years.

How high would $400 billion be if stacked one dollar on top of each other?

You couldn't see the top. It would be 27,000 miles high. (Even a paltry 1,000,000 dollars would be 27 miles high.)

The Iraq War will soon be costing the tax payers $500 billion--and counting.

A stack of 500 billion one dollar bills would soar 33,933 miles into space. (6,787 times higher than Mt. Everest) It would weigh one billion lbs.

Let's say I again decide to pay the $500 billion Iraq war bill--and end the war. At 40 hours per week I'll be 63 million years old when "Paid" is stamped on the invoice.

Our National Debt load has just been increased by Congress, with the president's signature, to $9 trillion.

This is far beyond this simple country man's comprehension. I'll leave it to others to put this amount in understandable terms--and I'm not sure then I'll understand.

As the crusty, old Illinois Senator once said "A billion here, a billion there; the first thing you know, you're talking about real money."

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Charles Sullivan is a photographer, social activist and free lance writer residing in the hinterland of West Virgina.
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