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Letter to the Editor: How much is $700 billion?

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Staff

Since the $700 billion bailout of the financial services industry appears imminent, I feel it is my civic duty to wrap my arms around a number that was, until now, beyond my comprehension. I did a little research to bring this astronomical number down to my level of understanding.

* If we laid $100 dollar bills end-to-end we could circle the globe 27 times with $700 billion.

* We could offer a free college education to over 13 million students at a public university for four years, including room and board.

* We could give every man, woman and child in this country $2,300.

* Only 16 of the 180 countries for which the World Bank provides estimates have GDPs (the market value of all goods and services produced in a year) which exceed $700 billion.

* If the success of the movie The Dark Knight could be reproduced 700 times, then box office revenues for Hollywood would approach $700 billion.

* $700 billion is about $140 billion more than we’ve spent on the war in Iraq since the invasion in 2003.

* At $4/gallon, we could buy every person in the U.S. labor force (both employed and unemployed, looking for work) 1,100 gallons of gasoline; at an average 20 miles per gallon that’s 22,000 commuting miles.

I always hoped that those at the helm were smarter than me. Those of us on “Main Street” now realize they aren’t smarter; they just make more money. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average wages of the 173,340 employees in the investment banking and securities industries was $8,367/week (that’s equivalent to $435,000/year) during the first quarter of 2006. This was almost 10 times the $841/week average pay of private-sector jobs. Naturally, I am suspicious that the bailout will do more to prop up these extravagant wages than to bring stability and jobs to our economy. I am also skeptical of a deal that took less time to negotiate than my teens’ monthly allowance.

Donna Kramer
Chapel Hill

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