After an optimistic day of blissful marriages and pop up chapels, whimsical urban farms, and serene Japanese modernism, we get an infographic which couldn’t exude more doom-and-gloom. Don’t let the stacks of money fool you. We’re screwed. Click for more.

The graphics visualize the current U.S. debt ($15 trillion and growing) in volumes, using the $100 bill as a building unit. The blocks of bills start off small enough–a million dollars does really fit into a couple of briefcases–but it all, like everything else, rapidly spins out of control. It would be hard to single-handedly sneak off with a $100 million dollars, it would take a whole SWAT crew to smuggle $1 billion, and you’d need a whole fleet of freight trucks to ship $1 trillion. The nation’s debt measures up to the Statue of Liberty, while $114.5 trillion–the amount of money needed to keep Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions afloat–soars past the WTC towers. In short, “it is the money USA knows it will not have to pay all its bills.” Way to be a bad news bear.

But not all is lost. We can’t even comprehend that much money, so why not have fun with this? We did some rough calculations using the infographic’s metrics (the square footage of 1 standard size pallet = $100 million) and drew some estimates measuring some of architecture’s greatest accomplishments were worth their weight in greenbacks. The base of the Great Pyramid of Giza could pack $4,640,950,000,000. A fire sale of the Acropolis site, as German politicians incredulously suggested to Greece, would yield a sum of $2,633,700,000,000. Mies’s Seagram Building would land the city $6,530,600,000,000, and the site of Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex at Chandigarh would accommodate $78,230,200,000,000. The most expensive painting ever sold Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, which sold for $140 million, would span $261,224,489. Fun, right?

$100

$10 Thousand

$1 Million

$100 Million

$1 Billion

$1 Trillion

Bad News

[via wtfnoway]

by Samuel Medina

posted in news

tagged bummer, infographic, money, NYC landmarks, scale, statue of liberty, U.S. debt

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