BEACHCOMBER
103 YEARS OLD AND STILL RATHER ZERO INTOLERANT…
AMOST garden birds only live for a few years and very few die from old age.
MUCH thought has recently been given to the question of whether we should spend £106billion on the HS2 rail network. This is hardly surprising as we are all rather bad when it comes to assessing large numbers, especially large numbers of pounds. I have therefore been doing some sums to try to get a grasp on how much £106bn really is, or to write it out in full £106,000,000,000.
We have all become too tolerant of all those zeros and come to think of a billion as just a sort of exaggerated million, so let’s bring a little zero intolerance to the figure and see what it really means. After all, even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has recently been assessed as the richest person in the world, might struggle to grasp such a sum. His fortune is estimated at $131bn which at current rates of exchange is only £100bn.
Furthermore, the total value of all the banknotes and coins in circulation in the UK as of December 2019 was only £82.65bn, so one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that the HS2 bill will not be paid in cash.
In 2019-20, VAT is expected to raise £137bn and the amount of health expenditure is £130.1bn, so we could raise the money by shutting down almost all the NHS and allocating most of the VAT revenue to HS2 instead, but that might be a little extreme. Cancelling both defence and education expenditure would not be enough, however, as those taken together come to £92.5bn. Nor would abolishing state pensions which are estimated at £101.2bn. The last time I looked at them, the plans for the HS2 network gave the length of the track as 330 miles. A total cost of £106bn works out at over £5,000 an inch or £200 a millimetre. This seems extravagant, but just consider one possible alternative: suppose we tried to build a pathway to the moon consisting of pound coins.
These are each 2.8mm thick, so 106 billion of them would be 296.8 billion millimetres high, which is 296.8 million metres or 296,800 kilometres.
The average distance to the moon, however, is 384,400km, so we’d run out of money three-quarters of the way. Even if we used 50p coins (thickness 1.78mm), a pile of £106bn worth would only reach the moon when it was near its closest, so a frequent service would be impossible.
Perhaps HS2 is a better bet after all.