I need a new frame of reference (and your opinion) [View all]

I've been looking for an easily understood and remembered way to think of how much a billion dollars is. A billion dollars is a shitload of money; it's a one followed by nine zeros: $1,000,000,000.

How many $25,000 jobs can you 'buy' with a billion dollars? $1,000,000,000 / 25,000 = 40,000. So one billion dollars can 'buy' 40,000 $25,000 jobs.

Let's give this a try with some big ticket items.

Here's a $35 billion dollar program that should be rethought: http://www.democraticunderground.com/11783348
35 x 40,000 = 1,400,000
Thirty five billion dollars = 1.4 million ($25k) jobs.

One more: We just floated our newest destroyer, the USS Zumwalt. The cost for this bad boy is $5.6 billion dollars or 7,840,000 ($25k) jobs.

Comments?

Thanks,
unhappycamper