Trickle On Economics

$700,000,000,000 is a lot of money. If I had started working 7 million years ago when I would have been a chimplike hominid precursor but made about the same as I do right now as a semi-employed "consultant", I would just have finished earning my 700 billionth dollar. Of course, demand for environmental lawyers was not as great during the pleistocene, so I would not have earned nearly as much. I would have had to start back when I was a shrewlike protomammal hiding from dinosaurs to get anywhere near $700 billion. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to save it all, so to amass $700 billion, I would have had to start saving during the precambrian era when I was crawling on the sea bed.

Let's put it another way. $700 billion is enough to buy every man, woman and child in China a really nice bicycle or a 32 inch HD TV. Or you could buy 5 million raised ranch homes for people who were displaced by foreclosures. You could buy 25 million oversized SUVs. It's also about $2,333.33 for each American. Or rather from each American.

If you took 700 billion dollar bills and stacked them up, I reckon the stack would be nigh on 13,500 miles high. Better use hundreds if you aim to stack the money. Actually, it would be highly impractical to put together such a stack. It would be unstable to say the least. Just stack the money as a thought experiment, okay?

There's a lot better ways to spend $700 billion than giving it to fat cat bankers and financiers. It's not going to trickle down to you and me, that's for sure. I call it trickle on economics. It is sometimes referred to as central planning.