Buddy Can You Spare Me $700,000,000,000?

I do want to help my vast readership better understand some of the physical aspects of the proposed bailout plan now being discussed on the floor of Congress. I will leave the economic analysis to the only American capable of understanding the complexity of the full bailout proposal, Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money Show". During the last great economic crisis, poor unfortunates on the streets of America (in today's lingo – Main Street America) were brazenly asking us to spare them a dime without any hint of oversight or guarantees of repayment. At least in this millennium's crisis we have a congress with the backbone to demand that missing oversight and those guarantees. Of course, this congress is asking us for seven trillion dimes. That is 15,868,000 metric tons of dimes.

Now this might be hard to follow, but the next few paragraphs will not only give a better feeling for the magnitude of the bailout, it will also point out four specific industries that will be saved by the bailout. Here are some physical properties of the $700 billion bailout:

• Weight: A dollar bill weighs about one gram. Therefore 700 billion one-dollar bills would weigh about 700,000 metric tons, about eight days' worth of all U.S. paper production, or the combined tonnage of seven Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
  



• Height: A dollar bill is 0.1 centimeters in height. Stacked one on top of the other, 700 billion dollar bills would form a pile 52,000 miles high, roughly a quarter of the way to the moon.
  



• Length: The length of a dollar bill is 15.6 centimeters. End to end longwise, 700 billion bills would stretch 65 million miles, two-thirds of the way to the Sun.
  



• Area: A dollar bill is 15.6 cm x 6.63 cm, or 103 square centimeters. Arranged in a big square, 700 billion bills would carpet 2,800 square miles, a swathe of land twice as big as Rhode Island and half the size of L.A. County.

Now it would not be practical to pay the bailout monies in one dollar bills so let's say we use new crisp $100 bills. We are giving these bills to Wall Street executives and bankers so leather attaché cases are appropriate. I found a nice one thanks to Google. It is made of calf leather and is sixteen by twelve by four inches. It will take 7,056,445 of these briefcases to hold the entire bailout [US luggage industry is now officially saved]. A cow hide is approximately thirty-one square feet. Each briefcase needs about two and one half square feet of calf leather for manufacture. This work requires over 705,666 cow hides to be purchased [US beef cattle industry is now officially saved].

In the year 2004 there were 1,814,491 people working in the US banking industry. The bailout will provide just about three attaché cases of cash for each banker or, more exactly, $365,794. [US banking industry is now officially saved]. I also thought that each member of Congress and each person working in the banking industry should receive a copy of the new Amazon.com release, "Mortgage Backed Securities for Dummies". This would be 535 copies for Congress and the 1,814,491 for the bankers and would be a boost for the publishing industry. [US publishing industry is now officially saved].

What is my contribution in all of this? In 2007 there were 138,000,000 US taxpayers. In the Pondit's household we have two taxpayers. My wife and I will soon "own" $10,145 worth of mortgage backed securities that the government will be buying. That is worth about as much as a new Chevy Silverado, which GM is currently deeply discounting so it can get these vehicles off their books and into the hands of the general public. Will I be required to foreclose on a fellow citizen's home in order to get back my share of the bailout money?