Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 138, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 June 1917 — MEANING OF $7,000,000,000 [ARTICLE]

MEANING OF $7,000,000,000

Spent at Rate of a Dollar a Minute, It Would Take 13,318 Years to Dispose of it All. America’s war loan of $7,000,000,000 surpasses the poWera of the nfind to grasp, Thomas F. Logan writes in Leslie’s. Spent at the rate of $1 a minute it would take 13.318 years to dispose of the appropriation. Loaned out at 6 per cent, sl3 could be spent every second for an indefinite period without touching the principal. Converted into sliver dollars, the coined pities laid end to end would reach morethan four times around the earth at the equutOr. Piled on top of one another, these silver dollars would extend nearly 600 miles in the air. Made into dollar bills, they would cover 26,686 acres. The interest on the loan is greater than the entire running expenses of the government less than half a century ago, while the amount itself would conduct the affairs of the government for fully seven years, on the basis of the annual expenditures of the last decade. Another and more cheerful way of looking at the situation is that, great as the loan is, the wealth of the United States is such that It amounts to the lending out of $1 out of every S4O of our existing tangible resources. A penny a day saved by every inhabitant would cancel the principal within 20 years.