When I was kid, trying to understand the scale of money, the way that I could always make a dime or a dollar concrete was to think about how many gumballs it could buy. At the time, gumballs were just a penny each. That’s no longer the case, unfortunately. It’s hard to find a place where you can buy a gumball for a penny. I was however, able to find a web site, GumBalls.com that sells a package 1,080 gumballs for 45 dollars. That’s a price of roughly 4 cents per gumball.

I’m thinking about the cost of gumballs today because I’m thinking about the cost of war. How many gumballs would it take to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, in dollars, the cost is 2.4 trillion. Multiply that by 25, and you understand, from the perspective of a bubble-blowing child, just how much America has lost: 60 trillion gumballs.

How many gumballs is that? If you want to imagine the worst nightmare of a school custodian, that’s enough to give 797,872 gumballs to every public school student in the USA. That’s 182 gumballs for every public school student to chew every day of their lives between the ages of six and eighteen. In other words, it’s more gumballs than all the public school students in America could chew, even if given 12 years to accomplish the task.

At a diameter of .86 inches each, those gumballs could be stretched 814,393,939 miles. That’s enough gumballs to reach all the way to the sun and back four times, and then make it one third of the way to the sun again.

It’s enough gumballs to pave a road between Washington D.C. and Dallas, Texas 8.38 miles wide.

That’s how much we’re losing in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that’s just the financial cost, and with all that, we still haven’t achieved victory in either place.

(Sources: GumBalls.com; Mapquest.com; Agence France-Presse, October 25, 2007; Near Earth Object Program)

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