I wish a Senator would bring stacks of fake money totaling $444,085,000,000 to the senate floor.

[RB TexLa]

That is what counts, and matters!

http://www.costofwar.com/

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

1. That or a big check

made of rubber

[Gregorian]

2. Even the fake stack of money would cost 400 million.

It's mind boggling when you put it that way. Say each dollar bill is worth a tenth of a cent. Am I doing this right? That would be about 400 million dollars just for the fake stack of bills. That's wild!

[Ediacara]

3. That's a stack of $100 bills about 525 miles high

44,408,500 bundles of $10,000, each about 3/4 inch thick. 500 million cubic inches of cash.

I doubt you could fit that much money in the city of Washington, much less the Senate chamber.

[Guaranteed]

I think you could fit it pretty easily within a city.

500 million cubic inches/1728 cubic inches per cubic foot = 289352 cubic feet of cash.

289352 cubic feet/5280 ft/mile = A stack a mile long, a foot high and 54 ft wide.

Or, a one-foot high stack of cash set out in a square of 537 feet each side.

An even better visual- that's just slightly over 5 football fields entirely covered in a one-foot high stack of $100 bills.

But, yes, that is still a whole lot of cash.

[Lisa]

4. what's the biggest denomination out there -- $10,000 bills?

I wonder what it would look like, if they had 4,440,850 pieces of paper cut to size and bundled onto cargo pallets?

Good idea for a visual, RGB!

[Ediacara]

5. No, just $100

The very high denominations were taken out of circulation in the 30s because of lack of use (or actually: high use in crime), and smaller high denominations were taken out in the 60s for the same reasons.

[Lisa]

6. thanks -- I didn't know that ...

All I recall is a short story that described someone trying to forge a $10,000 bill. It was probably a pretty old one (my folks have a lot of books from the 1930s-1950s) so no surprise if it's outdated.

Personally, I very rarely see a $100 (or even a $50) in my daily life -- just not a financial high-roller I guess!

Apparently we had $1000 bills up here in Canada until 2000 -- they were taken out of circulation for exactly the reason you mentioned (criminal activity and money laundering). One time in my life, in the mid-1990s, I did in fact handle one .... I had closed an account at the credit union and they gave me the money in bills (a thousand, a couple of hundreds, and some smaller bills and coins). I remember that the thousand was purplish.

[thecrow]

7. Fantastic visual aid for a protest march!!!!

All of us need to get busy cutting up our old printer paper.... then we could carry it in a long procession... and take it to a giant shredder in front of Congress....
The American people would be awed and apalled...

The Republics would absolutely SHIT THEMSELVES!

Let's put it together. Who's in on this with me?

[Guaranteed]

8. Find a football field, stack them up to 5 ft and cover the whole field-

(with anything, really- you could do it with boxes, even, maybe painted on top to look like a $100 bill, or a how-ever-many-billion dollar bill).

That would work. It would be about the same size.

[thecrow]

9. We need to do it on the National mall in front of Congress

But I like the box idea.... it would be easier for someone to bring a box painted like however many bills it represents, and much easier to carry and set up! So... are you in on this ?

[Lisa]

10. commercial printers can cut stacks of paper to size ...

It wouldn't be difficult to create facsimilies of the shrink-wrapped "footballs" of cash that contractors were toting around (and making off with!) in Iraq. Or the cargo pallets of cash that were flown over there on a regular basis.

It might also help to include signage that lists how much various things (a school, a hospital, 1000 affordable housing units, 10000 college scholarships) a particular stack of cash could buy.

[Guaranteed]

11. That's another good idea- splitting it up into labeled pieces. nt

[Lisa]

12. if short of space, time, or money ... could use Photoshop ...

Get a pic of one stack or spread-out collection of fake bills, then use it to create scenes showing larger amounts (e.g. enough to cover a football stadium). Would make a great poster.

[Cameron27]

13. Here's a site that has graphics

up to 315 billion dollars (photobucket's down or else I post the pic)

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/