Dude, you win! 
I’d create and fund a free-standing birth center in my city (Columbus, OH). It’s embarrassing that a city of this size doesn’t have one.
I’d probably follow Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in distribution, and I’d limit it to a medium sized city where $1 billion would really make a difference.
I’d give tens of millions to humanities programs in schools: field trips, visual aids, insuring there are college quality teachers to inspire interest, etc…
With a few tens of millions I’d endow a “vacation grant” fund for people from this city who are stressed out and need a vacation but can’t afford one. (It’s too high up the hierarchy of needs to have much btw of funding.) $50 million
I’d build and endow a cultural/arts complex (theater, museum, library,etc.) for a medium sized city ($250 million or so).
I’d provide scholarships and stipends to people over 35 (but especially single mothers) who need to enhance their skills. The scholarships would cover books and tuition and the stipend would pay the difference between the job they vacate to go back to school and what they were making when working full-time. ($100 million)
I’d endow a “modest needs” type unsecured loan brokerage- something like payday loans but with reasonable interest for people who are $500 short but have no collateral or credit they can leave. (I think this could actually be self supporting.) $50 million
I’d expand a teaching hospital and provide insurance for those without ($500 million or so).
To ensure people appreciate my generosity, I’d erect 30 foot tall sandstone statues of myself as an incarnation of Zeus, Osiris, and or Elvis for a 10 mile stretch leading into said medium sized city. (If there isn’t enough money left over, kill the hospital project.)
I just thought of another thing I would do. Boston has some of the best fireworks on the 4th of July if not the best in the U.S… They are spectacular and the cost millions of dollars a year. My hometown of about 1600 people is about to destroy that title. I will allocate $10 million a year for the 4th of July fireworks and maybe more for New Years Eve. I am not being flip. Such a tourist attraction which would be free is both a huge advertisement and a big revenue generator for the town.
Give it all to a deserving CEO on Wall Street to supplement his Golden Parachute.
What? Are you implying there are no deserving CEO’s who should get it?
Hmm…well, I guess I will just have to keep it until I find one and I will spend every waking hour in my villa scouring the press until I find one.
Or, I suppose I could use it to grant scholarships, or put it into research for alternative energy, or give it out in parcels of $100 - $1000 to people in impoverished countries to help start small businesses, or I could use it all and try to bring back Arts classes to as many high schools as possible…
A big chunk of the money would go to smaller environmental groups starting with Clearwater and Monmouth County Friends of Clearwater. I would research into other small regional environmental groups and I would also preserve land and do matching grants and find the right places to help fund solar & wind power.
Any project that has promise of helping halt AGW would get my help.
I would ensure that the Clearwater Festival and Clearwater Revival got some big name acts each year.
I would give about 975 million to NASA with my stipulations on how the money would be spent. I could easily live off of the remaining 25 million even after government taxes.
If I remember the frightening figures correctly, the state budget for NH schools is 900-odd million dollars a year. (though I don’t think this counts what the towns pay) And that’s grades 1-12. Lots of towns don’t have public kindergarten, so I think that’s what I’d like to spend the money on. That I know of 15 school districts have no public kindergarten still. I think I could get the ball rolling on some strongly early-literacy based kindergartens if I had a billion dollars at my disposal. Maybe preschools too. I could even afford to hire a team of grant-writers who can help find other grants to keep the programs going once the billion is gone, though I think it would take years before that happened.
And I’d like to institute trick-or-treating for adults in my town after the kids’ hours end. Kids trick or treat from 6-8pm, so I think 8-10pm for the adults is fair. The main cost would be hiring entertainment/supervision at a town party for kids under the age of 12 so their parents could go. I think a $75,000 a year at most would do it given there are only a couple thousand kids in town to be looked after and the town would probably let us use the gym to contain them. We might need a couple extra cops, too.
I’d use it to pull a huge practical joke on the world. Like, fake an extraterrestrial spaceship landing in Central Park. Replete with lasers and horrifying aliens. Snatch a few shills I have placed around the area, and take off, never to be seen of or heard from again… except for leaving behind the meaningless, red herring, of a code I had engraved in tungsten-carbide for intellects and nuts to ponder over for centuries to come.
Or, I could just buy the world a coke. But, they might have to share.
I’d donate it all to various webcomics just to see what kind of a reaction it would get.
If all the adults are out trick or treating who’s handing out the candy?
Boost certain illegal underground activities that I believe shouldn’t be illegal in the first place.
Teenagers! They keep asking us to build a high school, so there must be a lot of them. In this town they’re allowed to trick or treat with the other kids, so they could be home while the adults are out.
Hmm, a billion dollars dollars. What would I do with a billion dollars dollars?
I would run a smear campaign throughout the local media, blasting the small business owner who fired me from his computer store a couple years ago for allegedly stealing laptops (I would never do that), then refused my requests to see any security camera evidence against me, and also refused to let me talk to the police in order to clear my good name. I’d also give some money to a businessman to open up a computer store right next to his with lower prices and tell him to hire the asshole’s entire staff away at double their old pay rate.
I would build a twenty story building and fill half the floors with roller discos and the other half with really fat guys whom I would pay to just sit there and be fat.
I would round up the ten biggest alcoholics in town and buy them a Gulfstream jet, then pay them to embark on an ambitious quest to get blackout drunk in every country on Earth.
Pay someone to figure out a way to breed cats as big as horses for me to ride on, and hopefully not get eaten by.
That first one… great image!!
I also especially like the cat one. I always wanted a great big housecat. And yeah, hopefully it wouldn’t eat me. I have this particular discussion a lot with friends about what if I had a really big gigantic cat. They’re convinced that no matter how well the cat and I loved each other the cat’s instinct would kick in eventually and he’d eat me. It would be like, “Buddy, sweetie, good Buddy cat… Buddy? Kitty? Buddy, what are you doing?! Not my arm! No, kitty, NO! NOOOOOOOO…!!!”
Billion dollars…
Well my World Super Rescue team could get started. Basically setting up an airmobile hospital, supply distribution system, and heavy rescue team for responding into areas like post Katrina New Orleans.
Fund a nice womens health clinic where treatments are free and all patients and staff are picked up in limos with heavily tinted windows to protect their identities. Abortion Protesters would be subjected to random driveby with pepperballs and passerbys would happen to tazer one now and then… Inside would practically be a resort, massages, spa treatments, etc. A team of attack lawyers would be kept on retainer for any patient or staff member harassed for their involvement with the facility.
Offer legal fee assistance for anyone suing the Phelps clan for any semi legit reason.
Start private schools with heavy science and technology focus.
A public-access outside performance forum- Only requirement is you have to make an appointment to use it. And in off-hours, it’ll be equipped with lethal vandal-incapacitating security methods. (First, I wrote “vandal-killing”- and only reluctantly changed it.)
Teen Challenge, Salvation Army, Anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Centers, various Christian missionary & charitable groups- some of which would make heads explode here if I were to name.
Send e-mails to a bunch of randomly selected people in Nigeria.
(“Dear Sir or Madam: I have recently acquired the sum of $1 billion dollars, which it has been stipulated that I cannot use for myself…”)
(OK, I’d probably really just donate it to the Gates Fund or AmeriCares or something.)
Large Kitty
http://castlehill.yourguide.com.au/news/local/news/general/i-shot-a-panther/1320501.aspx
I would set up a 527 organization to run negative ads against all of the people running for office in the US.
Buy park land.
There’s an awful lot of land that’s been offered for parks (such as a plot of land on Lake Vermilion in northern MN that the Governor vetoed the money for), or is in the process of attempted purchase, but is awaiting the funds. There is also a lot of land in private hands that we hope will end up being part of parks in the future, like the land along the Vermillion river just south of the cities here.
I’d offer to buy Ted Turner’s 425,000 acre ranch in Nebraska and turn it into a national park. I’d buy land in other western hemisphere countries too, for the same purpose.