Brother, can you spare . . . about $700 billion?

WASHINGTON—Brother, can you spare a billion? More like $700 billion, to be precise.
With Washington trying to put together a $700 billion rescue for the nation’s financial system, the federal money sought by other projects is starting to look like small change.

You could buy yourself a war with that kind of money—the U.S. has spent $648 billion on Iraq war operations so far.
You could match Franklin D. Roosevelt on his “New Deal” to help Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s and raise him billions more.
Even in a town where billions come and go without anyone blinking, the money that could go into the Wall Street rescue is eye-popping. The House of Representatives yesterday voted down the proposed $700-billion bailout package, but congressional leaders said they were committed to trying again.
What else could the government do with a $700-billion blank cheque? There are, well, billions of possibilities.
It could ensure universal health care coverage for six years, for example, or upgrade the country’s most deficient bridges four times over.
All the work to upgrade coastal levees that’s been done since Hurricane Katrina? It’s a mere drop in the proverbial $700 billion bucket—$7 billion, or just one percent.
You could run an entire country. Seven hundred billion dollars is more than twice the size of the economy of Denmark, which had a GDP of $312 billion in 2007.
Seven hundred billion dollars would buy 70 Hubble-type space telescopes. Or about seven international space stations. It would finance the National Institute of Health, the premier U.S. medical research institute, for two decades. Or pay the U.S. national intelligence budget for 15 years.
According to the Wall Street Journal, half the money Roosevelt spent on his “New Deal” program to lift the country out of the Depression and banking crisis was for public works projects. For $250 billion in today’s dollars, the nation got 8,000 parks, 40,000 public buildings, and 72,000 schools
But that’s thinking small.
Presented with the presumptuous question of what could be done if the government suddenly came into a spare $700 billion, scientist M. Sanjayan said he would “re-envision how we live on the planet sustainably.”
“Instead of bailing out corporations with $700 billion, we could be bailing out nature,” said Sanjayan, lead scientist for the private Nature Conservancy. “We could fix all the harm we’ve done in the past but also get it right going into the future” in the ways that people get energy, use water, and procure food.
He’s talking about everything from creating “green” jobs to boosting solar energy and protecting watersheds.
Or, on a more mundane level, $700 billion could pay the wages of 22 million average Americans for a year (according to the U.S. Labor Department, the average non-supervisory, non-agricultural wage was $612 a week in August).
You even could shoot for the moon. The Apollo program that put man on the moon in 1969 cost roughly $164 billion in today’s dollars.
Truth be told, the government doesn’t really have this kind of money lying around to spend hither and thither. But there are plenty of other possibilities for the pondering:
•$700 billion would cover one year’s health care bills for more than 85 million seniors, disabled people, children, and low-income Americans enrolled in the two giant government health-care programs, Medicare and Medicaid (this includes the elderly in nursing homes and many of the frailest people in the country, whose care is the costliest to provide).
•The government could pay off the $550 billion in outstanding student loan debt in the United States, and then some (that’s from both government and private lenders).