Billions and billions . . . and billions
Posted by Steve Wilkins
I received a note on how much a billion is and it got me started. I wondered what the Federal budget is for this year — and, after some searching, I found it (it’s approximately $3.1 trillion for fiscal year 2009). Now, wondered I, just how much is that? I got my calculator out but it didn’t do trillions (heck, it didn’t even do billions!) so I had to use the calculator on the computer, but I believe the following figures are pretty close to accurate. In order to spend 3.1 trillion dollars in one year you’d have to spend:
$258,916,666,667 per month (almost $259 billion per month)
$64,729,166,667 per week ($64.7 billion per week) . . . or
$9,247,023,809 every day (that’s a cool 9.2 billion per day). But that’s still too big for me to comprehend. Break it down further:
$385,292,658 per hour (that’s 385.3 million dollars per hour). More? ok:
$6,421,544 per minute ($6.4 million per minute) or $107,025 per second (every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month for the next twelve months)
and right now, I can’t think of a single thing to say about this,
. . . . except, “Wow, that’s a lot of money!”
. . . but that would rank as a breathing-through-the-mouth level of dumb on the comment scale, so I’ll refrain.
