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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

What is $80 billion?

A breakdown of $80 billion

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Here's another way to look at $80 billion a year, including per-hour costs and a comparison to total U.S. Civil War costs.

How $80 billion breaks down:

- $6.7 billion a month

-$1.5 billion a week

-$219 million a day

-$9.1 million an hour

- $152,000 a minute

- $2,500 a second

That's more than the cost of the entire Civil War: It was $5.2 billion in then-dollars, $64.1 billion in 2004 dollars.

Source: U.S. Civil War Center at Louisiana State University

1 comment:

gberke said...

I don't find such a breakdown interesting.
For one thing, it is too abstract: that 80 billion is not being burned, it pays peoples salaries, burials, dividends, school taxes. What is not shows is that the 80 billion incurs great costs that essentially devalue that 80 billion: how much money will go for articifical limbs, crimes commiitted by deranged veterans. And the cost of lost opportunity as money is used inefficiently and real education suffers: still, it's easy to get an A in creation science, so that problem could be solved. All we need is creation math, creation football, etc.
The analysis of the power of 80 billion over many options is very complicated and potentiall rewarding. Reducing it to a rate of flow problem I can do on a $1 calculator is not news, and does not require a degree in journalism.