So I was having this conversation with a group including some persons who stubbornly trod the path of political error. (Part of my “outreach” program, itself a response to their “reacharound” program. But I digress…)
At one point I blurted “Hell, we could have papered over Iraq in dollar bills by now!” And one of the group said “Cite?” (Not exactly, none of the group is Cecilian, I’m translating from Normal…)
I am a mathtard. I have absolutely no such skills, no sense of logarithm. But I know that some of you do. Could we, in fact, have papered over Iraq with one dollar bills from the money we’ve spent on The Clusterfuck? Fives, even? Benjamins, Og Forbid?
I offer this challenge in the spirit of vigorous mental excercise, and not merely to add another dart to an arsenal of political sarcasm. Please note the big, brown, innocent eyes.
A dollar bill is approximately 156 mm x 66 mm. So, you woiuld need approximately 97 million of them to cover 1 square kilometre. Iraq is about 438,317 square kilometres. I make the product about 42.5 trillion dollar bills to cover the country. As far as I can tell, the war has cost about 500 billion dollars, so that means on 1/85 part of the country is covered so far.
Edited to add: So DSYoung and I only disagreed by $100 billion. Peanuts!
A square mile has about 4,014,489,600 square inches. The dollar bill in my pocket is 6-1/8" x 2-5/8", for an area of 16.078 square inches. That gives about 249,688,369 dollar bills to the square mile.
Iraq is about 167,400 square miles. So that works out to $41,797,832,970,600, which for the math impaired is $41.8 trillion. Even for the US government that a lotta scratch.
Coincidentally enough, water makes up about 1.1% of Iraq’s total area. So if you did want to paper it underwater, lack of material would not be one of your problems.
Looking at your figures, it seems we would have no problem papering the entire state of Rhode Island, which has an area of 1,545 sq mi, in dollar bill equivalent in value to what we’ve spent in Iraq.
Does anyone know where I can find a photoshopped image of bills covering the ground as far as the eye can see? How many bills would the eye be seeing, anyway?
Here’s other ways of stating the Iraq Invasion costs that might have some punch:
How many times would the cost of the Iraq Invasion in one-dollar bills stretch from Washington, D.C. to Baghdad and back again?
How high a fence around Iraq could we have built with one-dollar bills equal to the cost of the invasion? How high a fence around the Contiguous 48 United States?
It’s about 6000 miles from DC to Baghdad. At 6" to a bill and 5280’ to a mile, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 million dollars. I imagine we spend that pretty quickly.
Wait a minute, I just calculated that we could build a wall of pennies ~550 meters high around Iraq with the money we have spent so far! Please tell me this calculation is wrong.
I found the border length by assuming Iraq was roughly squarish and 662 km on a side. A penny is 19 mm on a side and 1.55 mm thick. This means I can surround Iraq with pennies for the low price of 1.39 million dollars. Then with 500 billion, I can build a wall ~359,000 pennies tall…
Your math looks OK to me, but let’s assume the border of Iraq is 3x what you say it is. That would make the penny wall about 180 meters. That’s about the height of the Seattle Space Needle.
