How much is $871 million?

Every two years, Nevada's governor and lawmakers get together and guesstimate.

They predict how much money the state will take in and figure out how they're going to spend it. Pretty straightforward during boom years.

But when the money doesn't come in, they have to refigure -- cut budgets, raise taxes, shift money around.

Like right now. The state is projected to come up $871 million short of what it had planned on spending in 2009 and 2010. That's a lot of money.

How much?

If you stacked 871 million dollar bills atop one another, it would reach 60 miles into the sky. Placed end to end, they would stretch one third of the way to the moon or wrap around the Earth three and a half times.

Piled up, those dollar bills would weigh 1,000 tons.

Laid flat, they would span 2,250 acres. That's enough to cover the Las Vegas Boulevard from Fremont Street to Mandalay Bay in dollar bills.

It would be enough money to build your own megaresort on the Strip.

You could buy a major league sports franchise and move it to Las Vegas.

Or you could fund a winning presidential campaign.

It's enough to buy every person in Clark County a cheap laptop computer or every person in Nevada a flat-screen television.

You could cover almost half the cost of Toyota's recall or pave a road from Las Vegas to Victorville, Calif.

You could send 3.5 trillion text messages at a quarter each or pay off one fourteen-thousandth of the national debt.

If you had that much money, you could give every school kid in the county a monthly $200 allowance for a year. Or design and build 25 new libraries.

That much money would be enough to pay every homeless person in Clark County the state's median income for a year and a half.

Same goes for schoolteachers.

It would pay the salary and overtime of every cop and firefighter in Clark County for a year.

It would be enough to pay the tuition and fees for every college student in Nevada for four years.

That's how much money $871 million is.

That's how much money the state's political leaders have to cut from the budget.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.