By Nancy Benac
What else could the US government do with a $700 billion blank check? 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 1 percent.
You could build 1,750 bridges to nowhere.
Or run an entire country. Seven hundred billion dollars is more than twice the size of the economy of Denmark, which had a gross domestic product 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 Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier 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 F.D.Roosevelt spent on his New Deal program in 1933 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. Read the rest of this entry »
