COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Do you have a billion dollars? I don’t. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately though — not having a billion dollars, just spending it.

I’ve been to Washington, D.C. twice in the past 10 days, wearing my OCTA Chairman’s hat and looking for transportation money for Orange County.

It’s a cool hat by the way. It says “The OC” on the front and has a little car, a bus and a locomotive on top. I get a lot of attention with it, especially in restaurants.

I spent four days running around the Hill talking to members of Congress and senators and testifying to a House committee about the Obama economic stimulus package.

My pitch was that if you’re looking to create jobs, there is no better way than public works projects. Build a new freeway or a new rail line and you will put a whole lot of people to work, fast.

A few hours after I testified before the House Transportation Committee, I listened to the tussle over the stimulus package on the House floor.

The vote came in about 6 p.m. — it passed, with a price tag of $819 billion, which is a big price tag. Now it’s up to the Senate to do their thing.

Only $60 billion of the House version is for public works, which doesn’t make my heart sing, and of course there is the usual strange if not inexplicable stuff that ends up in any federal spending bill.

Billions of dollars in the “economic stimulus package” will be spent on things like weatherizing homes; expanding broadband service in rural areas; after-school snack programs; digitizing medical records, to say nothing of $335 million for public information about sexually transmitted diseases; $75 million for anti-smoking programs; and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

See? If we could just get more weather-stripping on the doors, a better cable signal in Iowa, more Twinkies and string cheese in schools, the results of your blood work on disk and a PowerPoint for people who are smoking while they’re having unsafe sex in museums — it’s nothing but blue skies and green lights, and the economy should snap back within weeks.

And here I was, lobbying for major freeway and transit projects in Orange County that would create more than 50,000 high-paying jobs within 120 days. I feel like such an idiot.

But as I sat in one meeting and committee hearing after another, I was constantly reminded that it is really hard for the average Joe and Jane to relate to the amounts of money being tossed around.

Let’s start small and get big — thousands, millions, billions, trillions. It’s easy to wrap your brain around a thousand dollars.

Your car payment is probably half a thousand dollars, more or less, and your mortgage or rent is some multiple of a thousand dollars every month.

A million dollars is a little trickier. It’s big but it’s still manageable, a thousand times a thousand dollars, either a one followed by six zeros — 1,000,000 — or a thousand with three zeros tacked on, whichever you prefer.

A billion dollars gets a little weird. It’s more money than almost anyone alive or dead will ever see, and it’s hard to grasp. Everyone knows that a billion dollars is a thousand times a million dollars, but truly understanding how much money that is takes some work.

Try this. Think of a thousand dollar bill. They exist by the way, although you and I don’t normally see them. A million dollars in $1,000 bills, meaning 1,000 of them, is a stack of bills 4.75 inches high.

A million bucks in $1,000 bills is just under 5 inches high. As everyone knows, a billion dollars is 1,000 times a million dollars, but picture this. Multiply that million- dollar, 4.75-inch stack of bills by 1,000, and you get 4,750 inches, which is just under 400 feet — a 40-story building.

Do you see the jaw-dropping problem? A million dollars, 4.75 inches high; a billion dollars, a 40-story building.

But now, you really have to stretch. All this talk lately about financial bailouts and stimulus packages in Washington is in reality about trillions of dollars, which is almost impossible to grasp.

A trillion dollars is easy enough to put into words — a thousand times a billion dollars — but let’s get back to our imaginary graphics.

If a billion dollars is a 40-story building — a trillion dollars is a 40,000-story building. Have you ever seen a 40,000-story building? Me neither.

Since the straight-up analogy falls short, let’s try one in a straight line.

Let’s say a rocket is racing away from the Earth at the speed of sound — about 750 miles per hour. If it were unreeling a string of thousand dollar bills behind it, do you know how long it would take it to unreel a trillion dollars’ worth of thousand-dollar bills? Fourteen years — that’s how long.

That’s 14 years, nonstop, at the speed of sound, to crank out a trillion dollars in thousand dollar bills. That’s how much a trillion dollars is.

So after all these years, Sen. Everett Dirksen is still right, although we’ll have to update the numbers: “A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon — you’re talking about real money.”

That’s it then. Capitol Hill, the stimulus package and Twinkies. Where will it all end? Your guess is as good as mine.

I can tell you this though: Wherever it ends, it won’t be cheap. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.