How much is 10 billion?

We are enlisting soon, so expect posting to slow down quite abit. Nevertheless, we will try to post once every week or so.

But before we go, here is something to chew upon.

Most people are quite unhappy with how our government spends taxpayer money. But lost amidst this anger is a true sense of proportion. To put it simply, we just lose sight of how excessive government spending can be, causing us to end up missing the forest for the trees.

So lets regain this sense of proportion by talking about what 10 billion can do.

How large is 10,000,000,000 dollars exactly? It is:

• Enough to cover all of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve with $50 notes
• Enough to go to the Moon and back with 1 cent coins
• Enough to provide a $5 plate of chicken rice to every single person living in Singapore every lunch for an entire year.
• Enough to provide more than $30000 to all resident retirees in 2008. To break it down further, thats $2500 every month, much more than quite a few make.
• At a price of 10 USD per tonne,  enough to offset our 2007 CO2 emissions (39.9 million tonnes) 17 times over.

It is more than enough to eliminate GST and all motor vehicle taxes/vehicle quota premiums i.e. COE. Alternatively, we could cancel off all personal income taxes, or exempt all companies from corporate taxes.

Its 2.5 times the cost of the entire GST offset package, nearly 10 times of the 2009 A*STAR budget, more than 3 times what has been allocated to the LTA on the MRT system this year and 22 times the MFA budget.

And while you may complain about the ministerial pay increases, 10 billion is more than sufficient to pay for 35 PMOs, or for that matter, nearly double what the government spends on all its manpower, which was projected to be 112,113 employees. Thats 2% of the entire Singapore population.

With 10 billion, we could pay for all food and non-alcoholic drink consumption by our residents in 2008, or pay for 7 months worth of all their transportation costs.

Or, the government could just pay for everyone’s consumption for an entire month.

Amazing?

What is more amazing is what 10 billion isn’t enough to pay for.

10 billion is a drop in a bucket compared to our $187 billion of official foreign reserves

Neither for that matter is it enough to cover the $163 billion sitting in the CPF board .

They are a drop in a bucket compared to the $265 billion and $185 billion locked up in the GIC and Temasek respectively. For a sense of how truly stupendous these figures are, $265 billion is more than enough to give everyone the entire year off.

On a final note,10 billion isn’t enough to fund our annual military expenditures and it would only have kept our government running for 83 days in 2009. Granted, government is supposed to spend in times of recession, but even in 2007, that figure would have extended to 110 days, or less than 4 months.

So really, we the people need to take a good look at how government finances itself.

PS: We have not adjusted for the impact of inflation here, but this should not be that significant given that we are considering a rather short time frame.