
{"id":3553,"date":"2008-10-02T07:49:43","date_gmt":"2008-10-02T15:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=3553"},"modified":"2008-10-02T07:49:43","modified_gmt":"2008-10-02T15:49:43","slug":"letter-to-the-editor-how-much-is-700-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2008\/10\/02\/letter-to-the-editor-how-much-is-700-billion\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter to the Editor: How much is $700 billion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\n* If we laid $100 dollar bills end-to-end we could circle the globe 27 times with $700 billion. <\/p>\n<p>* We could offer a free college education to over 13 million students at a public university for four years, including room and board. <\/p>\n<p>* We could give every man, woman and child in this country $2,300. <\/p>\n<p>* 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. <\/p>\n<p>* If the success of the movie The Dark Knight could be reproduced 700 times, then box office revenues for Hollywood would approach $700 billion. <\/p>\n<p>* $700 billion is about $140 billion more than we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spent on the war in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. <\/p>\n<p>* 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 22,000 commuting miles.<\/p>\n<p>I always hoped that those at the helm were smarter than me. Those of us on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Main Street\u00e2\u20ac\u009d now realize they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 monthly allowance.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Donna Kramer<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Chapel Hill<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}