Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Gatsby]

I was thinking, how do you explain to someone what $700,000,000,000 is, aside from having a whole lot of zeros?

How many school books could you buy, how many teachers could you hire, how many meals could you serve to the hungry, how many computers could you put in schools and libraries, how many bowling balls could you buy? Whatever. How can you put this in real terms that people would understand?

Or put another way:

If you had 700 billion dollars to spend, what would you buy?

Perhaps a better way to put this is, if you had 700 billion dollars to invest in America, to do something good, to stimulate the economy, to improve the quality of life, to help the environment, to help solve the problem of global warming, what would you do with it?

I tried doing some math to come up with possible answers, but ran into a problem. My pocket calculator doesn't handle numbers this big. The calculator on Windows goes this big, but it doesn't put commas in, so I had trouble counting the zeros. I guess I need to find a better calculator, or something.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

The US will probably one day sell of the loans on the books at a profit.

[sojourner1]

With 700 billion dollars, you could put the whole country back to work in new companies as well as upgraded older companies and even produce new technology. You do anything you wanted with 700 billion dollars. You could repave the whole country; upgrade everything. You could fix all unnecessary problems.

Any country with 700 billion dollars to spend is filthy rich.

[bacasper]

Pay for everyone's healthcare.

And education.

Raise teacher's salaries.

[Kuros]

Universal Healthcare.

Nationwide, interconnected mass transit.

Energy-efficient buildings that generate their own power.

[gangpae]

It probably won't be enough money. Paulson, Bernanke, and all the others are lying through their teeth. If the value of real estate in the U.S.A. = 700 trillion and if the defaulters are 10% the toxic debt is 70 trillion. Add on top of that the fact that the over-consumption that the sub-prime system encouraged is probably going to result in a significant drop in consumer demand we can expect unemployment to increase. The negative savings rate in the U.S. was the ticking time bomb that has finally gone off. The financial gurus are running around trying everything they can think of to keep the system "liquid" but they are fighting a loosing battle. Economics dictate that the more people live beyond their means the harsher the correction. Expect much higher taxes, useless bloodsucking zombie banks, and an end to the good times for decades. 700 billion is like using a fly swatter for a missile defense system. On the positive side the ensuing depression will probably solve America's immigration problems.

[Gatsby]

Found a great calculator from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=32b0d059-b53a-4dc9-8265-da47f157c091&displaylang=en

This is a big improvement over the one included with Windows. And it solves this specific problem by putting in commas and letting you add zeros two or three at a time. You can cut and paste the calculation and the answer.

[VanIslander]

Well, the richest man on the planet is the Mexican Carlos Slim and he doesn't even have 60 billion.

700 billion eh.....

The top four oil companies combined for just over 100 billion in profits last year.

700 billion is the gross national product (GNP) of India, Mexico and Korea.

[TexasPete]

$700,000,000,000....

A stack of one dollar bills equaling that amount would be 250,833,333 miles high OR a little over a hundred million miles further than the distance between the sun and Mars.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

Q: Is the US population increasing or decreasing?

Just curious.

[Gatsby]

According to my calculations, a $700,000,000,000 stack of one dollar bills would be only 44,177 miles high.

That's still about twice as high as Mt. Everest.

If someone wants to check my math, here's my starting point source:

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/

.

[RJjr]

A minimum wage employee working a 40 hour week would have to work until around the year 57,500,000 A.D. to earn that amount of money before taxes. Give or take tens of thousands of years.

[TexasPete]

[RJjr]

[Nowhere Man]

About 3 years in Iraq, give or take a couple hundred billion.