To the editor:

So, we taxpayers are going to bail out this financial problem with $700 billion. How does one grasp that number? Seven hundred billion is a number seven times greater than the number of stars in the galaxy – way too astronomical to grasp. We need something easier with which to compare.

This weekend I purchased a 50-pound bag of fertilizer for my lawn. As I poured it into my lawn spreader, I wondered just how many of those tiny fertilizer granules there are in the bag. I measured the mass of one average granule at 1.2 milligrams and the bag has a mass of 22.68 kilograms. Doing the math I found out that the 50-pound bag has about 18,900,000 (about 19 million) granules of fertilizer in it.

So, if each fertilizer granule represents one dollar, doing the math tells me that I would need about 37,000 50-pound bags of Scotts Turf Builder to finally accumulate 700 billion granules of fertilizer. The bags would all together weigh 1.85 million pounds, or 926 tons, or the same as about 460 cars, or two Union Pacific Challenger 4-6-6-4 steam engines with tenders.

Robert J. Vaughan,
Lawrence