Now that we know that healthcare reform is going to cost around a trillion bucks. I got to wondering just how much money that is.
If I owned a building that was a bit larger than the size of a football field (let’s say 96,768 square feet, about 2.2 acres), and the government came to me and said, “Healthcare reform is going to cost about a trillion dollars and we would like to store that amount of money in your building so that when the bill comes due we will be able to pay it.” Setting aside for the moment that any government official with that sort of attitude lives with Santa Clause at the North Pole, I would have to consider just how I would go about storing that amount of cash.
Since the largest bill currently in circulation is the $100 dollar bill I would have to get the cash together in bundles of $100 dollar bills, pack them on pallets and move them into my building. OK, let’s get started.
First I suppose I should band the bills in stacks. Let’s say 100 bills to a stack. Now how many stacks will I need to store? Well, if I put ten stacks in a square and then make ten layers high I get a square of 100 packs of 100 bills worth a million bucks. And my stack is only about 12” wide by 12.5” deep by 4.3” high. This isn’t going to be too bad at all!
To make storage easier I think I’ll use commercial pallets to make stacking and transfer easier. To cover the pallet with one layer of my 100 bill bundles I need to lay out 7 packets ($10,000 per packet) wide by 16 packets deep. This single layer covering my pallet is worth $1,120,000. Because stacked paper is very dense, I can only put about 90 layers on my pallet. And 90 layers will be worth $100,800,000. But for the sake of simplicity I’ll just count it as an even one hundred million dollars. The government likes to round things off anyway. Not bad.
Now I’ll move that pallet to the back corner of the building and fill another pallet. After a couple of hours work I have ten pallets filled with $100 million bucks each and have them neatly parked in the back representing a cool $1 billion smackers. And I have a ton of space left. I bring in some day laborers (forgive me if I don’t check ID’s) and we really get an assembly line going. I decide that we may as well stack the pallets two high and by day’s end we have one complete row of 50 double stacked pallets worth ten billion dollars. This is taking a bit longer than I thought.
Next morning, bright and early I bring my crew in (now double the size) and we really get to work. And by the end of the work week we are finished. And to my amazement we have filled the entire building with double stacked pallets (one hundred rows of 100 pallets). That’s 10,000 pallets each containing 90 layers of 112 bundles of $100 dollar bills, 100 bills to a bundle. That’s 1,008,000 bills per pallet x 10,000 pallets…my calculator doesn’t have enough columns to compute that but just how in the hell are we supposed to pay for all this?
If someone had told me when I was born (I suppose they would have had to tell my mother and she could fill me in when I was older) that I would live to be 75 years old and I was to be given $1 trillion dollars to spend during my lifetime, I would need to spend $36.5 MILLION per day. Now that is a life time occupation.
