"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Friday, March 14, 2008

I Got Five On It

The United States Treasury Department has just issued the newly redesigned five dollar bills. This move should thwart the latest efforts by counterfeiters since they've been bleaching the ink off of ones and reprinting the old fives on the special paper that is made exclusively for the U. S. Mint. They printed fives because up until now they were the only bill besides the one that used the old designs. These new bills with the giant purple numeral five on the back virtually scream, "I'm legitimate and I'm totally gay!"

In an earlier post, I railed against the cost of the Iraq war because, among other reasons, experts have said that it's total cost will reach into the trillions. We throw around words like million, billion and trillion when discussing money without really realizing just how much scratch we're talking about but if you happen to be robbing a bank or anything like that it's useful to have some perspective. Here are some helpful comparisons:

  • one million dollars in one hundred dollar bills weighs about 22 pounds and stacks up about 4 feet high.
  • one billion dollars in one hundred dollar bills weighs about 11 tons (22,000 pounds), as much as 3 adult elephants and stacks up about 4/5 of a mile high.
  • one trillion dollars in one hundred dollar bills weighs about 11,000 tons (22,000,000 pounds), as much as the dome of St. Peter's basilica in Rome, the largest dome in the world and stacks up about 800 miles, or about 4 times as high as the International Space Station currently in orbit.

So if you ever find yourself in that bank vault unsupervised, grab as much as you can carry but just know that you'll be nowhere close to making yourself a billionaire.

1 comment:

Doug"e" said...

Billions, trillions, gazillions whatever!-- They are just big numbers bandied about to try and scare the American public out of the stupor they have slipped into. I mean come on , it's not like we'd have to pay that back in Euro's, now that would really SUCK!
The rest of the World is on to us my friend. They know that with each passing day our money is becoming increasingly worthless.
While the Neo-cons are busy trying to scare the bejesus out of us with the call for ever bigger defense budgets, we seem to have forgoten a financial lesson from recent history. The year was 1989 and the Soviet Union imploded because they were too busy building bombs and missles and not taking care of their people. I see much the same happening here today. No the collapse of the United States will not come from some wayward missle from some rogue entity, but rather from within because we ran out of money and ran out of gas.