Like the late Sen. Everett Dirksen is ascribed to having said, "A billion here, a billion there – and before you know it you’re talking real money."
But I was wondering, how difficult is it to actually visualize $700,000,000,000? And I remembered enjoying Chris Jordan’s artwork, collectively titled "Running the Numbers" where he uses an everyday item in incredible multiples to compose a piece of art.
Specifically I remember his "Ben Franklin" installation. It measures 8.5 feet wide by 10.5 feet tall in three horizontal panels, and depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million) – the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.
[SIDEBAR: His site his worth a look just for its jaw-dropping capacity]
According to the Bureau of Engraving, the size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness – or 2.61 inches wide by 6.14 inches long, and .0043 inches thick. So it takes $233 bills (232.56 to be more precise) to make a 1 inch stack.
Googling a little, I found CrunchWeb had done a nice visual comparison based on the money spent in the Iraq War – so let’s start our visualization:
Six dollars, set side by side, measures about 12 inches long and 7½" inches wide. That's roughly the size of a sheet of typing paper (a little longer, and a bit narrower)
$72,000 is about the size of a whole box of copier paper.
Using the footprint of that box of copier paper (24" x 15"), $360,000 would make a stack 5 feet tall – a little shorter than the height of the average woman. And if you made a single stack, it would be 120 feet high.
Nine million dollars would make the pile 5 feet tall, 10 feet long, and 6¼ feet wide. A single stack of dollar bills in this amount would be 3,000 feet high.
This cube is comparable in size to a single compact car.
Nine-Hundred Million dollars, and the mound of cash would be 20 feet tall, 50 feet long and 31¼ feet wide. The single stack of dollar bills is now climbing to 300,000 feet, or 56.8 miles.
That’s comparable in footprint to a tennis court. [78’ x 27’]
Three-hundred-fifteen billion dollars ...
This pile is 125 feet wide, 200 feet deep and 450 feet tall.
That’s the height of the Millennium Wheel in London or the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. And if you were to stack the money in a single stack, it would be 19,887 miles tall – or enough to wrap around the moon almost 3 times.
I’ll let you double everything from there ... because you just KNOW it’s going to end up being more than $700,000,000,000.
But here’s a fun little video visualizing $1,000,000,000.