A Rolly War: How Much Toilet Paper Is Iraq Costing?

April 21, 2008 – 12:01 am

How is Bush's latest war funding request roughly equal to the amount of toilet paper needed to cover Texas and California? How much would it cost to cover Iraq in toilet paper? Read on and find out.

In my previous post on how much toilet paper it would take to cover the state of Texas, I gave you the area (268,580.821 miles), number of rolls (141 billion), number of squares (59.93 trillion), and even the number of rolls/squares to cover cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. But what I neglected to give you was how much all that toilet paper would cost.

When I read a New York Times article on Bush's latest war funding request it occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to revisit that. How was the cost of toilet papering Texas roughly equivalent to the cost of the war in Iraq?

First, I called the Everett, WA Costco for the price of a 36-pack of their Kirkland brand, two-ply, embossed toilet paper. They said it was $17.

That ticked me off. See, at $17 per 36-roll pack, it would cost $66,556,476,090.37 for an amount of toilet paper equal to the area of Texas. But that's not a nice round figure. You see, if you want impact, you want the 36-roll pack to cost $13.79, so your price is roughly $54 billion and Bush's funding request could TP Texas twice. "Twice" is a lot more zippy than "1.62 times."

So I needed another state to tack on that was roughly 62% the size of Texas. Since Texas is our second largest state (Alaska is biggest), I jumped to the third largest, California. Well, that's about 60.9% the size of Texas. Good enough.

The combined area of California and Texas is 432,276.393 square miles (or a little over 96.4 trillion 4 x 4.5 inch individual squares). That much Kirkland brand, two-ply, embossed toilet paper (at $17 per 36-roll pack) would cost $107,121,548,396.55, which is $878,451,603.45 less than President Bush's latest funding request. So, you could cover two states in two-ply and have over $878 million in change.

And now that we've figured out the cost of the toilet paper, what would the Rough Equivalents be for some other areas?

• Bush's Crawford Texas Ranch:
  • 1583 acres
  • 551,643,840 squares
  • 1,297,985.51 rolls
  • 36,055.15 thirty-six-roll packs
  • $612,937.55

• Iraq:
  • 169,234 square miles (according to Wikipedia)
  • 37,743,785,164,800 squares
  • 88,808,906,270.12 rolls
  • 2,466,914,063.06 thirty-six-roll packs
  • $41,937,539,072.02
  • According to many "cost of the war" tallies that put us over $500 billion so far, we've spent enough to cover the whole country in toilet paper over 12 times.

• Rhode Island:
  • 1,545.046 square miles
  • 344,587,283,251.2 squares
  • 810,793,607.65 rolls
  • 22,522,044.66 thirty-six-roll packs
  • $382,874,759.22
  • $108 billion could toilet paper Rhode Island 282 times.

What rough equivalents can you come up with at $247,808 per square mile of toilet paper?