How much is a billion? A trillion?

The GAO estimates that Medicare lost $60 billion in fraudulent charges in 2014. Thus far we have spent about $4 trillion on our assorted wars in the Middle East including long-term veteran’s pensions and medical care. The US national debt stands at about $19 trillion. The US military budget for 2016 is about $600 billion. The Chicago public pension fund currently is $104.6 billion short.    It is hard to get one’s head around such big numbers – millions, billions, trillions.

A billion is a thousand million (the British used to have a million million in a billion, but they have converted to the US system now.)

A trillion is a thousand billion, or a thousand thousand million. So how much money is that?

Parkland Memorial hospital in Dallas Texas is a newly-built major teaching hospital with 862 beds and about 2 million square feet of space, and it cost $1.3 billion to build. So for what Medicare lost in fraud in 2014 alone we could have built 46 such hospitals, almost one per state.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2015 that it would cost about $3.6 trillion to bring the entire US infrastructure (roads, bridges, train tracks, power lines, phone systems, high-speed internet, water systems, sewer systems airports, seaports, etc) up to good condition. So for what we have spent and committed in our Middle East wars we could have fixed all the infrastructure in the nation with enough left over to perhaps build one or two major new airports or another interstate highway or two across the entire nation.

The average 4 year cost at a private college these days is about $130,000.  So the $19 trillion US national debt is equivalent to putting a little more than 146 million people – about half the entire US population – through an undergraduate degree at a high-priced private college.  Another way of looking at the debt is that every US man, woman and child owes about $60,230.

Nationwide (obviously there are large local variations) the average cost to build a 2000 square foot house is about $300,000. So the $600 billion US military budget could build about 4.6 million average-sized houses per year.

The average public school teacher salary in the US is between $42,000 and $49,000, depending on grade level, experience and specialties.  So let’s say the total average is about $45,000. The amount that the Chicago public pension fund is short would pay the annual salaries of about 2.3 million new teachers.

Or as Senator Everett Dirksen (Illinois) is supposed to have said (though apparently he never did), "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Makes one think, doesn’t it?