Ever wondered what spending 1BILLION dollars looked like?  (FYI that’s 1,000,000,000.00)

The incredibly intelligent and creative people at informationisbeautiful.net made the mutha of all graphs, which they named “The Billion Dollar-O-Gram”.  Check it out (and read more after the dollar-o-gram for context described by the pros who made it.)
And here’s the info… straight from the source at informationisbeautiful.net:

The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.

All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar

A little context

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)