WHAT’S A BILLION REALLY WORTH?
Adapted from Where Does the Money Go? Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis
by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson, of Public Agenda

The trouble with big numbers (and almost all the numbers thrown around about the federal budget and national debt are big) is that they’re hard to visualize. The $60 you take out of the ATM on Monday morning is crisp and tangible. You know what it takes to get through the week and you know whether you’re going to have to stop at the bank again before Friday.

A billion is just a number. There’s no billion-dollar bill (although it’s fun to speculate which president would be on it) A trillion is even worse. These are important ways of keeping score, but really difficult to grasp. And when you start talking about big numbers you ought to know how much they really mean in practice – as Dr. Evil found out as he tried to look threatening when he made his demand for “one million dollars .”

But the best way of dealing with intangibles is to make them concrete. There’s a Barenaked Ladies song called “If I Had a Million Dollars .” Like most folk songs, it’s been (a) co-opted for a TV commercial and (b) can be difficult to get out of your head if you’re not careful. But if you had a billion dollars and an inclination to play Santa, you could:

• Buy about 250 million bottles of aspirin (or about 126 million bottles, if you go with a name brand. See how it pays to buy generic?)

• Give four spiral notebooks to every student in public school in the United States (about 49.2 million children)

• Get a pair of Gap jeans for everyone in Australia (21 million, not counting shipping). Or, if you’d rather work closer to home, that’s enough to give all five million people in Minnesota their own Ipod nano

• If you’re a shoe-obsessed fashionista like Carrie in “Sex and the City,” you could buy yourself 1.7 million pairs of Manolo Blahniks. (If you’re shoe-obsessed but less self-absorbed, that would allow you to give a pair to everyone in Manhattan and Staten Island. Including the men).

• You could also provide all 35,000 students at the University of Houston with their own Toyota Camry. Not the base model, either – you could get the optional leather seats and high-end sound system.

• You could keep about 45,000 people in a four-year private college for a year – or, depending on their behavior, in prison. The College Board says private tuition and fees average $23,712 a year; the Bureau of Justice Statistics says the average cost per inmate is $22,650.

• You could pay the salaries of about 20,000 rookie cops to put on the streets of Los Angeles (starting pay: $47,043) There are only about 9,000 officers in the LAPD now.

• Based on the Census Bureau’s median prices, you could buy homes for nearly 12,000 families in Mississippi, or 2,100 homes in pricier California.

Big ticket items, of course, cost more, and you get less for your money. A billion will only get you:

• Four Boeing 777 airliners .

• Half of a Trident nuclear submarine, at $1.9 billion each. Want missiles with that? Another $2.2 billion.

• One-third of New York’s proposed Freedom Tower ($3.1 billion)

But what about trillions? They’re really mind-boggling. To figure that out, just add three more zeros to any of the numbers above.

Or instead of only four Boeing 777s, you could get close to 4,000, enough to replace the fleets of four or five major airlines (for example, American Airlines and its American Eagle subsidiary have about 890 planes).

But let’s make it as down-to-earth as possible. There are about 300 million people in the United States, more or less. And let’s say you wanted to do something for every one of them. With $1 billion, split evenly, you’d have a little more than $3.33 to spend on each one.

With $1 trillion, you could spend $3,333.33 apiece.