$700,000,000,000

What you could do with
$700,000,000,000

• Give every person in the U.S. $2,300 or give every household $6,200
• Pay the income taxes of every American who makes $500,000 or less a year
• Fully fund the Defense, Education, State, Veterans Affairs and Interior departments next year, as well as NASA
• Buy gasoline for every car in the U.S. for 16 months
• Buy every NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball team and build each a new stadium--and pay your players $191 million apiece for a year
• Create the 17th largest economy in the world--roughly equal to that of the Netherlands*

These are admittedly kind of silly. But it does help us understand how astronomical this dollar amount is - a 7 followed by 11 zeroes.

I makes me wonder what we could, as a nation, spend this kind of money on. Maybe...

• create an affordable healthcare plan for all Americans
• invest in research for renewable energy to rid ourselves of our dependence on foreign oil and address the issue of climate change
  
• eliminate the inequity in the quality of our schools so that poor children have just as much opportunity as suburban children

And then it also makes me wonder about why (oh WHY?!) we are fighting a war in Iraq. Bush's war of choice, an unnecessary war, has not only cost us 4,175 deaths and 30,634 wounded**, it has cost us financially:
***

Does anybody else find this simply incredible?!

Sources:
*Time Magazine, Oct 6, 2008 p. 36
**icaualites.org/oif/
***http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home