Visualizing One Billion Dollars.

The Death and Taxes poster contains a lot of information and is great for putting federal spending in context.  However, the de-facto unit of measure is one billion dollars.  I realized that people often have a hard time grasping just what one billion dollars is.  So to provide further context to the poster, I am putting one billion dollars into perspective.

There have been other attempts around the web to imagine what a billion dollars might be, but they tend to obfuscate the problem further.  You can go here and learn that one billion credit cards weighs as much as 78 brachiosauruses or that one billion dollars in pennies would cover 14 square miles, but does that all really mean anything?

Let’s investigate what one billion dollars is and how it relates to us and our world.

Now most people will never see $1 billion themselves.  If you live in the United States, there is a 1 in 800,000 chance that you’re a billionaire, which are about the same odds as winning half a million dollars playing Powerball.  So ingenuity, hard work, and inheritance will net you a better rate of return than the lottery, but for those of us without such gifts, one billion dollars is only attainable when working in groups.

If you have a PH.D. then you already have a leg up on everyone else.  Just gather together 278 of your doctorate friends and add up all the money all of you make during the 40 or so years of your career and presto!, One billion dollars.

Of course if you don’t have a PH.D and consider yourself just an ‘average’ guy, you will have to work a little harder, a little longer, or instead, just round up an additional 312 of your ‘average’ guy friends.

If you’re female you will need another 178 doses of girl power to reach one billion dollars over the course of your collective lifetimes.

If you consider yourself black or African-American you will need almost twice the man/woman power to reach a billion.  An additional 656 lifetime contributions will do the trick.

Of course if you are in the unfortunate position of living below the poverty line, it will take an entire regiment of your unfortunate brethren to come up with one billion dollars in a lifetime.

In reality, the federal budget is an annual process, so understanding a billion dollars in terms of lifetime incomes is only of moderate use.  To bring it down to the annual level, you are going to need a lot of friends.  This is assuming you and your friends represent the mean American.  That’s mathematical mean.  I’d imagine an unearthly level of charm is required to achieve this number of friends.

When relating to federal spending, we ultimately have to relate to taxes.  So here is the amount of people required to support one billion dollars in federal spending.    To put it another way, the taxes paid by everyone living in New York City is almost half of the annual cost of the war in Iraq.  You would have to tax everyone in L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Detroit to come up with the rest.  Again, this is assuming everyone in New York is an ‘average’ American, which is certainly not the case considering 40 of the aforementioned billionaires live there.  But you get the idea.

Before we get too far along on a socioeconomic tangent, lets switch gears.  If you happen to be so lucky as to win the Powerball lottery jackpot, odds being 1 in 146 million, then you are well on your way to being a billionaire.  Now all you have to do is win the jackpot every time for the whole year.  Impossible?  Surely not, why the odds are only 1 in 8 septendecillion.  That’s 55 digits.  If you are a string theorist, you might find those odds attractive.

Now that you are the luckiest person ever to live, what are you going to do with your winnings?  Blow it on something totally ridiculous of course.  That’s right, with your one billion dollar bank account you could purchase every action figure in sold in the US for a year.  Or all the video games for a few weeks.  I think we know that a year long reign as Lord of the Plastic Figurine to be the awesomer option.

Now forget that pipe dream! We are relating to government spending here and the gov’ment ain’t got time fer toys.  Instead of a nations’ worth of plastic superheros, one billion dollars can buy you half a plane.  Now, if we are talking strict off-the-line unit cost, then you could fly away in a B-2 with $250 million in cash stuffed in the weapons bay.  But you would first have to find someone to foot the R&D costs for you, which isn’t likely.  So $2.2 Billion is the total get-my-money’s-worth price for a B-2.  A bit out of reach for a lowly one billionaire.

The black market is where the action for the warlord on a budget.  Especially in Africa where a slightly used AK-47 will cost you 1/4 the price it would if it were bought in the Middle East; around $200.  One billion dollars could corner the entire black market for firearms.  You would need substantially more if you wanted to do it legally, providing the U.S. alone with $1.2 billion.  We are talking small arms here — machine guns, pistols, rifles, grenades, etc, which is only about 20% of the total international arms trade.  Even still, there is plenty of guns to go around, approximately one for every man, woman, and child in North America.  If you include military small arms, we will have to arm up South America as well.

Edit: I tried for about 45 minutes to think of a clever segue from fire arms to breakfast cereal but failed.  If you think of one let me know and I will credit you.

If you bought up all the stock you would enjoy the benefits of General Mill’s one billion dollars in profits.  That’s a lot of Boo Berry.  Yes, to further put the figure into perspective, this food giant, whose cereal you have grown up, with can put together one billion dollars worth of profit on $11 billion in sales.  This would place them somewhere around 200 on the Fortune 500 and 250 on the global Forbes 2000 lists.

Breakfast peddlers can’t hold a candle to the sheer monetary force of international war-making.  The entire yearly profit of a sprawling Fortune 500 company could be absorbed over a weekend in Iraq.  The war in Iraq is the first war in which we have had to borrow money from foreigners since that Revolutionary one we fought 225 years ago.  Back then the movies cost a nickle and a war was only $15 million.  Even adjusted for inflation and its not more than a week’s worth of Iraq’s expenses.  In fact, as you read this post, it’s costing $6,024 per second to wage war over there.

Two days in Iraq, annual income of 25 thousand people, a years worth of lotto winnings, its all one billion dollars.  I hope the preceding images have put that dollar amount into some perspective and that the information in the Death and Taxes poster is of a bit more use.  The National Cancer Institute receives $5 billion per year; that’s 10 days in Iraq, the cost of two and a half B-2’s, the tax revenue from half a million people,  every lotto jackpot for five years, etc.

To really understand federal spending, we need to put the information in to a larger context.  That is what the poster if for.  To relate federal spending to ourselves, we need to bring this large numbers down to eye level.  Hopefully, the next time you hear that the government spent ABC billion on XYZ you will think, “That’s a lot of action figures!”

Source: People. Guns. Toys. Lotto. Planes. War. Boo Berry.

Visualizing One Billion Dollars. has 11 responses Add your thoughts.

Spread the Word!

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate. ”

The American people are already invested in their government, yet they are clueless or worse, misinformed, about their investment. If people actually knew how their tax dollars were spent, in their name, they would riot in the streets. Ok, perhaps not riot, but at least demand some more accountability of their elected leaders. Help spread the word! Below are some resources to help you do so. Feel free to copy, cut, and arrange to suit your needs.

Here is a link to a much larger full version for you to work with. CLICK HERE

Banners, banners, banners!

Feel free to hotlink to any of these banners.  There should be one for all flavors.

Skyscrapers banners, 150×600.

Standard size 150×200

Buttons

Spread the Word! has 2 responses Add your thoughts.

Death and Taxes, Microsoft, DeepZoom and a beer fridge.

So I was invited over to Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, WA, to talk with Larry Larsen, a Microsoft evangelist about Death and Taxes and the Deep Zoom application of it.

Here is the video. It uses SilverLight which is basically Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. You can get SilverLight here and I highly recommend having it.

Larry was a great guy and Microsoft is not as stodgy as people think. There were plenty of ‘toys’ around and they even had a fridge with free beer. The offices were a bit like catacombs but the people seemed fun.

It was a quick trip, in and out of Redmond in about 24 hours. The video was posted on Channel 10, Microsoft’s blog for power users and early adopters. You can view it here.

I was a bit surprised that they flew me all the way out there for a blog interview, but such is the whims of the largest software company on earth.

Death and Taxes, Microsoft, DeepZoom and a beer fridge. has no responses Add your thoughts.

Martha Stewart, Death, and Taxes

On April 15th, Tax Day, I, Jess Bachman, appeared on the Martha Stewart Show.

It was an odd segment for her show which typically deals with crafts, gardening and cooking. Indeed I was in between Elizabeth Vargas who was cooking prosciutto and peas, and eco-friendly gardening. The experience was great in which I detail below, but without further ado, here is the video.

Here is how the whole affair came about.

I received an email several months ago from a producer who thought the poster would make some good tax day related content. I sent them a video of myself talking about the poster so they could see that I was good on camera and not some numbers obsessed loony. The segment got passed around to numerous producers until it finally landing with Geoff Rosen. Although I have to give credit to Lenore Welby who was the first to pick me up and then subsequently went on maternity leave.

Geoff and I tossed around ideas and angles over the phone and settled on a rather long script outline that consisted of Martha’s basic questions and my responses. I arranged a flight to New York City and they arranged a hotel (DoubleTree) and rides to and from the studio. I haven’t been to NYC since I was a bit younger so it was interesting to be there with some free agency, although I was stuck in mid-town with not a lot to do. I mainly rehearsed my script in my hotel room and watched a PBS documentary on some old dead literary luminary whose name i have completely forgotten.

The next morning I was up at 6 AM and at the studio at 7:30 AM. After going through security, of which there was more of than at La Guardia, I met up with Sarah Polite, an all purpose assistant who showed me to my dressing room. The room was nice and small and came with a muffin and a few bottles of water. There was a closet, desk, chair, mirror, TV to watch the live feed, and a large black and white photo of a child running with a wild look in his eyes. It was slightly disturbing.

I met up with Geoff, who looked slightly older than I, 27, even though he mentioned he had worked on the Rikki Lake show several years prior. We went over the script together and took me to makeup where they teased my hair, which I later fixed, then they teased it again. I also had bronzer and some other miscellany applied to my face and neck, all a first for me.

Back to my dressing room while I waited until Elizabeth Vargas to finish her studio rehersal. Then Geoff and I took our turns in front of the cameras and empty studio audience. I ran through the script a few times and I knew it was a bit long but Geoff assured me we could get it in on time. I also had to hold all the little graph props they had made while the cameras took bank shots. The stage manager was quite chipper and moved things along pretty quickly.

Back to my dressing room again while the 10 o’clock hour rolled around. I started to watch the live feed but it made me too nervous so I turned it off. Geoff comes in wanting to know if I knew how much the IRS spent on audits. I didn’t think that information was publically available and told him so but he said Martha really wanted to know so if I could find out that would be great. I couldn’t so they actually placed a call to the IRS and were subsequently told that that information was not publicly available.

A few minutes before our segment Geoff took me out to the studio. I had some last minute hair touch ups and attention from some guy whose sole purpose was to use a lint roller on my black sweater vest. A few members actually took my picture while I was waiting off camera, thinking I must have been photo worthy, only to be disappointed that I was indeed, the tax guy. In fact, I was the tax guy the whole time I was there as various assistant producers and Martha employees brought their tax related questions to me. “So, if I file in one state, but my main income is in another state, do I have to…”. I really focus more on the government spending side rather than the personal taxes side, but people didn’t seem to care, I was the tax guy.

So we get back from commercial and I am sitting there with Martha ready to start the live segment. Immediately she calls me “Jeff Bachman” when my name is “Jess Bachman” so I shoot her a quick look which gets caught on camera, look for it. Then she derails the script by asking the audience questions and such so we are way behind on time for an already tight segment. Needless to say I had to leave stuff out while trying to hit my main points all the while Geoff is off to the side waving his arms in a “Hurry it up” type motion. It was fun though, I had prepared well and I thought I looked rather natual for my first time on national TV. After the segment wrapped, Martha and I had a quick chat about how much taxes she pays and such. I told her that I calculated that she herself has paid over $100,000 for the War on Terror alone, and she quipped that it was likely much more due to how the government got her a while back.

A photographer took a few photos of Martha and I, although I am not sure for what purpose, as I never received any. Thten back to my dressing room to relax and what the rest of the show. Sarah, the assistant comes in and says that Martha wants 20 posters to give out at a dinner party she was having on Friday with the mayor and other guests; she ask that I make some calls. I said “Now?”, she said “yes.” So I arraigned posters to be overnighted to NYC for her party. I hope Martha didn’t get in over her head with all the information, its a powerful tool.

After the live show wraps I am out the door and take a car back to the hotel. Catch a flight home an hour later. I am now a celeb, although people fail to recognize my new found ‘famous person walk’ in the airport. That’s ok though, I have plans to do a NYC/LA junket next year, Jon Stewart, Letterman, Leno, Oprah, Tyra, Dr Phil, Montel here I come, enlightening federal budget visualization in hand.

Martha Stewart, Death, and Taxes has one response Add your thoughts.