HOW MUCH IS A BILLION DOLLARS?

  Sometimes we can get caught up with numbers that few of us really understand. For example, if you heard the the Government had spent a billion dollars on X (whatever X is) you would (depending on your political persuasion) say that was a fair price or that was completely exorbitant. But regardless of your belief as to whether the amount was fair or exorbitant the truth is that you really have no true appreciation of how much a billion dollars is. So let me help you by putting it in context for you:

If I told you that I would give you one dollar for every second that passes as from now, it would take you about ELEVEN AND A HALF years before that amount reached a million dollars. Now, if I said I would give you one dollar for every second that passes as from now, it would take a little over THIRTY ONE AND A HALF years before you collected one billion dollars!

Let me put it another way for you: if I gave you a billion dollars on the day that they crucified Jesus Christ with the proviso that you spend one thousand dollars a day every day, and you lived forever;  today you would have about a hundred and ten years to go before you ran out of money!

And that is why we find it difficult to understand news reports that say that a project cost $X billion or that the Government lost $Y billion on it.  Unfortunately, very few people in the whole world will ever amass any where close to a billion dollars either in cash or in kind and there are fewer still who really understand or appreciate how much one billion dollars really is. Oh! We know that it is a lot, but we have no real idea as to how much it is.

Perhaps it is time that we pay attention to Government spending and ask ourselves whether or not we are getting value for money or is there too much waste?