Human imagination is a powerful thing, as evidenced by the conversation of friends and neighbors frothing over the $1.7 billion lottery now waiting to be won by yours truly, or at least someone I know who might not miss a few spare millions.
Despite the intoxicating nature of dreams, even the most sober thinkers struggle to fully comprehend what it means to have a mere million of anything.
If the Georgia lottery sent a caravan of dump trucks to your driveway and stacked up a million dollar bills how high would it be?
The answer: About 360 feet, more than two times the height of the Flatiron Building in downtown Atlanta, according to my new, unpaid writing assistant ChatGPT. That’s greater than the distance of an Atlanta Brave home run if hit to left field (335 feet) or right field (325 feet). In Truist Park’s center field, a ball lofted 360 feet stays in for an easy out.
The height of a billion dollars? That stack’s almost 68 miles high. Higher than 12 Mount Everests. The Earth’s atmosphere is unbreathable at such lofty heights, but Wednesday’s lucky Powerball winner could afford a ride with Jeff Bezos if they weren’t embarrassed to be seen in that tawdry spaceship of his.
Laid end-to-end, $1.7 billion in $1 bills could encircle our planet more than six times.
How much would all that dough weigh? A whopping 3.7 million pounds, the equivalent of 3.7 million loaves of bread, coincidentally, give or take a few hundred thousand slices.
Unfortunately, the taxman assures us a Powerball winner can never take home the full advertised jackpot.
A single winner of the Wednesday drawing could take an annuity, paid out annually over 30 years, or a lump sum payment of $756 million. That wad of cash would drop to just $476 million after federal taxes, according to an analysis by USAmega.com.
In Georgia, with a max 5.75% state income tax, the lump sum payout would be reduced again to $433 million.
The annuity? You’d take home an average of about $32 million a year, which you might be able to get by on even with new, expensive hobbies such as fire truck and winery collecting. At the end of 30 years you’d have pocketed almost a full billion.
What you might not know about the annuity is that the winner starts with smaller payments. But a first-year $15 million return on my $2 investment still sounds pretty solid. On the last year of the payment schedule you’d bank about $107 million.
What can Georgia residents buy for $433 million? I’m sure you have your own wonderful ideas but here are a few of mine.
- 15% of the Atlanta Braves, which are worth an estimated $2.75 billion
- 2.7 million years worth of digital news from AJC.com at the current low-low price
- A small cruise ship (At least $300 million)
- A private island in the Bahamas ($2 to $60 million)
- Greenland (or at least a large chunk of it)
- A U.S. House seat ($8 million)
- A U.S. Senate seat ($37 million)
- The presidency? (I’m a few billion short!)
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