On September 7th, 2003, President Bush announced on national television that he was asking the Congress to grant him an additional $87 billion dollars for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But $87 billion is an impossibly high number for anyone to visualize. Let's have a look...
One dollar It's roughly 6 inches long, and 2 1/2 inches wide. It's roughly as thick as a regular piece of paper.
Six dollars Set side by side, roughly 12 inches long, and 7 1/2" inches wide. Very roughly, a little longer, but narrower than a sheet of paper.
$6 will buy you 3? gallons of gas (at $1.69 a gallon).
Three thousand dollars Roughly the thickness of a ream of paper, 2 inches thick or 500 sheets. If you made a single stack, it would be a foot high.
You could buy one really top of the line notebook computer for this pile of cash.
Seventy two thousand dollars This is about the size of a whole box of copier paper. If you made a single stack, it would be a stack 24 feet high.
This is equal to twice the amount of money the average person in Brooklyn, New York, makes in a year.
Three hundred and sixty thousand dollars A stack 5 feet tall. Shorter than the average American man. If you made a single stack, it would be 120 feet high.
You can buy a pretty nice house almost anywhere in America for that kind of cash.
Nine million dollars The pile is 5 feet tall, 10 feet long, and 6? feet wide. A single stack of dollar bills in this amount would be 3,000 feet high. This stack is comparable in size to a single compact car.
You could buy 505 of them for the amount, though, with enough cash left over to fill up the gas tanks of 139 of them.
Nine hundred million dollars This pile is now 20 feet tall, 50 feet long, and 31? feet wide. The single stack of dollar bills is now climbing to 300,000 feet, or 56.8 miles. This pile is about half as long as a conventional tennis court.
This load of money will buy you 600 million loaves of bread, or 225 million six-packs of soda in Barbados.
Eighty seven billion dollars This is what the President is asking for. It is 100 feet tall, 250 feet long, and 125 feet wide. A stack of singles would be 28,998,000 feet, or over 5,492 miles, or a round-trip between Washington DC and Los Angeles, California. (2,650 miles, one-way).
A Boeing 737-200 jet is 100 feet long. You could fit 2 of those jets nose to nose along the length of this pile, and have room to spare.
If we spread the $87 billion over an American football field, we would not be able to see much of the game. The players would be buried in 55 feet of money.
$87 billion is more than all of the states' current budget deficits, combined. $87 billion is more than twice the amount we're spending on Homeland Security.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
One hundred sixty six billion dollars This equals the total amount of money President Bush wants to spend in Iraq & Afghanistan by the beginning of October, 2004 : the $87 billion he wants, plus the $79 billion he's already spent.
You can barely see the man down in the corner.
This pile is 500 feet long at its longest point, which is quite a bit longer than an American football field. The roof opening of the Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, is 500 feet long. This pile of money is still 100 feet tall, and 125 feet wide. If you stacked the bills in a single column, it would be 55,333,200 feet tall, or almost 10,500 miles, or 1.68 times the distance between Washington DC and Baghdad, Iraq.
$166 billion is $568 for every man, woman and child in the United States. It's $3,269 for every person in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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