Musings on Large Numbers

So I had a client no-show today - and rather than do what I normally do in that circumstance (surf the web, chat with co-workers, catch up on notes, etc.) I decided to entertain my curiosity and get smart on something.

See, on my drive in to work, they were talking about the election. What else could there possibly be to talk about, right? Anyway, they mentioned a number off-hand that caught my fancy. They said that between the two Presidential candidates, more than $6 billion has been spent on campaigning. That includes party contributions, Super PACS, and grandma's $5. All the money that has thus far been spent on the election in any fashion. But that is just the presidential race. The state and local races weren't factored in.

So that got me thinking. I once worked with a guy who had a real fondness for large numbers, and helping people to realize just how big these numbers are. So I wondered just how big the number 6 billion is.

For starters, and obviously, it is 6,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeros. Or another way - if you had a room full of millionaires, there would be 6,000 of them. That is a lot of custom tailored suits and sports cars to valet park, and way too many over-priced purses and shoes.

Here is another way of looking at it. According to the magical interweb (US Mint website) the US Quarter is 0.069 inches thick. So, $6 Billion in quarters is 1,656,000,000 inches. That is 138,000,000 feet. These are all still very large numbers, and hard to wrap your head around. So lets make it even more simple. $6 Billion in Quarters, stacked in a column, would be 26,136 MILES high. To put that into perspective, the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. So you could literally walk all the way around the earth on a cable made of solid quarters and still not have walked on $6 Billion. Or another way of looking at it - you could drive round-trip from Anchorage, AK to Panama (as-in the country of Panama) twice before you hit 26,136 miles. Either way, that is a very very very large amount of Quarters. I was going to try to figure out how many hours of old-school arcade games you could play with all those coins, but my brain melted.

We are talking about real money here, though. Not cables of quarters. These are amounts of money that could seriously change people's lives. I can't even begin to imagine what I would do with $6 Billion to spend. So I broke it down into numbers I can start to fathom.

The first house I ever bought cost approximately $250,000. 6 Billion get you 24,000 of those.

The average US Household Income for 2012 is $50,502. 6 Billion is the a year's income for 118,807 of these households. That is more people than live in either Beaumont TX, Evansville IN, Lansing MI, Provo UT or Norman OK. So essentially, you could hire an entire city's population, for a whole year, and still not spend all of your $6 Billion

But Americans are really really rich compared to the rest of the world. The average household income for the world is roughly $7000 (that is rounded up from several different sources). At that rate, $6 Billion would pay a full year's income for 857,142 people. Now we are talking about all of the people in Jacksonville FL, San Francisco CA, Denver CO, Indianapolis ID or Ft. Worth TX.

$6 Billion is significantly more than the entire annual GDP of Haiti.

That is what I was able to discover about $6 Billion during my free hour.

All this money is being spent on the world's most expensive job interview. And no matter who wins, that money has virtually no guarantee on return, because the President has to fight with Congress to get anything done. So in all likelihood it will be another four years of ineffective partisan bickering, letting the country come to the verge of bankruptcy, with looming fiscal cliffs, enormous deficits, and other real problems that need solving remaining unaddressed because neither of the punk kids in the sandbox know how to share.

If you spread that money out equally among all Americans, each of us would get $19.06. That is not a lot of money, of course. You couldn't really do anything significant with less than 20 bucks. But if you piled that money up just for the 46.2 million Americans officially living below the poverty line, it comes out to $129.87 each, or roughly $520 for a family of four. I could definitely do something very meaningful for my family with $520. There has got to be something better we could do with that money than produce annoyingly bad commercials, print bumper stickers, and fight with each other.

As our elections keep burning through more and more money, I am not seeing that we as a nation are benefiting an any way. Politicians keep telling the same lies, making the same ridiculous promises they don't have the power to keep, and then going off to work in Washington where they don't care about you and me, they only care about their party bosses and their lobbyist buddies. I certainly don't feel like the $6 billion spent on this one election is going to do anything for me. I would have much preferred the $19, so I could have at least gone to a movie with my wife. I will still vote my conscience, and my conscience can't be bought.