A billion

The next time you hear a politician use the
word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about
whether you want the 'politicians' spending
YOUR tax money.
A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,
but one advertising agency did a good job of
putting that figure into some perspective in
one of its releases.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were
living in the Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two
feet.

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and
20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

check snopes

Here's how I conceptualize "a billion dollars":

A billion is a thousand million. A million dollars is enough money that a family can live comfortably off the interest. So when a politician is promoting some government action that's gonna cost three billion dollars... this means that for the same cost, 3000 families could be taken care of FOR LIFE.

A trillion dollars is a million million. It's also a pretty rough estimate of how much Dubya's current idiotic war will end up costing us (NOT including long-term costs from veterans' physical and mental problems, which some folks have estimated to be around 2 trillion)

So rather than killing 4000+ Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis (or hundreds of thousands, depending on who you ask)... with the same amount of money, we could've kept our people alive (and a few tens of thousands of brown people- not that that matters much to us) and ONE MILLION FAMILIES could have been taken care of for life. Or maybe it's three million... depending on whose figures you use.