One of the issues with the bailout that is being proposed--along with the money shoveled over to AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--is that the scale is so large as to border on being unfathomable. 700 billion dollars is almost fundamentally impossible for me to wrap my head around. Whenever such a large amount of money is bandied about, though, I like to try to picture it in the form of 100 dollar bills.
The effects generally produce a strange mix of utter astonishment and end-of-the-world giddy laughter.
I'll start by owning up to my deficiencies. I was not able to find an authoritative source about the weight of American currency. After much googling, I saw there was a consensus that American dollars weigh just shy of a gram. I verified this with a food scale that worked in grams.
The real weight is just shy of a gram, but we'll round up. We're also going to assume that each denomination weighs the same, which does not seem terribly unreasonable.
That said- there are roughly 454 grams in a pound. That would mean there are 454 American notes in a pound. A million dollars would be 10,000 hundred dollar bills. That would be 10,000 grams, or approximately 22 lbs.
Think about that next time you see a movie with an underfed starlet hefting around a suitcase with a million dollars in.
At any rate- there are, of course, one thousand millions in a billion. Each million is 22 lbs of hundred dollar bills; therefore, in a billion dollars we would have 22,000 lbs of American hundred dollar bills. For those who are interested, that is 11 tons of money.
We have spent 85 billion dollars to purchase AIG in order to keep that economic neutron bomb from exploding and wiping out a good portion of our financial sector. Atrios has stated (perhaps just guessing) that Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac may run taxpayers as much 200 billion dollars. Now our President is asking that Congress allow the Secretary of the Treasury (with little to no oversight, naturally) to transfer 700 billion dollars from the tax payers to the very companies that precipitated this financial carnage.
Those three actions total 985 billion dollars. Each instance of a billion dollars, as we have already determined, works out to being 22,000 lbs of hundred dollar bills or 11 tons. At 985 billion dollars, we are looking at 21,670,000 pounds of hundred dollar bills, or 10,835 tons.
The total weight for all of the copper used in the Statue of Liberty is 225 tons. If you were to place on one side of a scale the weight of money we have spent and are going to spend bailing out reckless Wall Street investors, it would take 48 Statues of Liberty to balance it.
The Liberty Bell originally weighed 2080 lbs. We will round down to a ton, just for ease of division. Therefore, if you were to place on one side of a scale all of the money we are going to shovel into the ravening maw of Wall Street, it would take 10,835 Liberty Bells to balance it out.
The total weight for the steel in the Gateway Arch of St. Louis is 5,199 tons. It would take two times that amount to equal the weight of hundred dollar bills that we American taxpayers are going to hand over to bail out the smartest guys on Wall Street.
Finally, and you'll have to forgive the lack of rigor but I don't have the mathematical training to figure out how to do this precisely, if you were to assume a 50-50 gender split in a city comprised entirely of average weight Americans (191lbs for men, 163lbs for women, or 177 when averaged) it would have to have a population of 122,249 in order for the total weight of its citizenry to equal the weight of this bailout.
That's bigger than Waco, TX. Such a city would be within the top 200 cities in America based on population.
Just a little something to think of the next time you or someone you know tries to fathom exactly what 985 billion dollars would look like.