Americans Have Become Desensitized to Large Numbers for Health Care, the Deficit, and Just About Everything Else. Time For Some Sticker Shock.
Dr. Evil: ”Here’s the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for… ONE MILLION DOLLARS!”
Number Two: “Don’t you think we should ask for more than a million dollars? A million dollars isn’t exactly a lot of money these days.”
- From the movie Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery
The largest dollar bill ever issued was $100,000. It featured a dapper Woodrow Wilson in tie and glasses on the front (chosen, no doubt, for his invention of the Federal Reserve) and was discontinued in 1935. Today, the highest note in circulation is $100. Estimates on the cost of Obama’s health care plan range from several hundred billion to 1.5 trillion. What would paying that off look like?
Answer: a LOT. Let’s start with an even trillion, for the sake of simple math. It takes 10 thousand of our largest bills to make a million. It takes 10 million of them to make a billion. And of course, 10 billion $100 bills for a cool trillion. At a width of .0043 inches a bill, a trillion dollars in Ben Franklins comes to about six miles high. But that’s just saving trees. Using $1 denominations, the length increases to 67,866 miles high, or nearly three trips around the equator. That’s a lot of air miles on Delta (several free round trips to a Swiss bank, at least).
Now here’s the real ticker kicker: that’s more money than the U.S. currently has in circulation. Estimates for 2008 were that $853.2 billion was in motion, and $625 billion dollars of that was in $100 bills. If those numbers are a challenge to grasp, put on your swim suit. In $100 bills, Obama’s $1 trillion would fill 4.5 Olympic swimming pools. The currently available $625 billion dollars in $100 denominations would only fill 2.8 Olympic swimming pools. That’s a lot less splash room than we need for the health care plan. The cost wouldn’t come all at once, of course (Obama currently proposes paying it out over 10 years), but it’s easy to see why this amount of money is so troubling.
So what can the President do? Print money? Well, yes. Despite claiming in March of 2009 that he “can’t print money,” Obama defied even his own low expectations and went ahead to do just that. The technical term is “quantitative easing” but the danger is the same – inflation. With Americans pinching every dollar, the last thing we need is a dollar that’s worth less.
Sources: U.S. Treasury, CNBC, and a calculator.
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Skyla Freeman is a former writer for President George W. Bush. She blogs about style and culture at Sanity Fair online (sfair.blogspot.com).
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