MATH Question of the day:  HOW MUCH IS $787 Billion???

Dr. Robert J. Rapalje, Semi-Retired

Seminole State College of Florida

Sanford, FL  32773

February 14, 2009

The Congress of the USA has just passed a $787 Billion Stimulus/Spending Bill!! 

If $787 BILLION in $1 bills are neatly stacked in a single stack,

how tall would the stack be?

If these were $20 bills, how tall would the stack be?

SOLUTION:    

The first question to be answered is "Wouldn't it have been nice is SOMEONE had been given time to READ the Bill???"

The second questions to be answered is "How thick is a $1 bill?"  According to WikiAnswers, the thickness of a dollar bill is 0.0043 inches, which means that you can stack (assuming no air or wrinkled bills!!) 233 dollars to an inch.   To verify this result and verify all calculations, click here .

To solve this problem in METRIC units (kilometers!)—remember, most of the world IS METRIC—click here .  

Also according WikiAnswers,  $1 BILLION dollars would make a  vertical stack that is about  67.7 miles high.  Click here for the actual calculations!

Now, multiply 67.7 miles per billion times $787 billion, and you have a stack of cold cash 53,300 miles high (rounded to three significant figures)!  That's over twice the distance around the earth at the equator!!  That's a LOT of MONEY!!

If these were $20 bills, assuming the same thickness, just divide by 20, and you get a pile of money that is  2660 miles high (in $20 bills!).  By next week, this will probably be a stack of bills that would reach from Washington DC to the Pacific Ocean!  And don't forget--this is in a single stack of $20 bills laid from sea to shining sea!!

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