It happened in a college class in the late 1970s, or what I like to recall as The Stoned Age.

Our math professor gave the students an option: write a term paper or – as an alternative – gather all the students in the class together (there were 26) and collectively make a billion chicken scratches on pieces of paper. If we could successfully pull it off, we’d all get an A.

My classmates thought the latter was a great idea, and one night a week before the paper was due, a half-dozen of us started making scratches. We made it up to 1.7 million of them over the course of four days, as I recall, before we gave up – well under one percent of the total needed.

The professor had made his point: a billion is a helluva big number. We figured out that if we were to make a scratch on paper every second, it would take 31.7 years. That’s with no sleep, no breaks, no eating, no bathroom visits. Just eternal scribbling.

Similarly, it would take you nearly 32 years to spend a billion dollars if you plunked down a buck every single second, a rate of $86,400. Every. Single. Day. (Spending $1 trillion would take more than 31,000 years.)

I bring this up now to drive home the point that $1 billion is an insane amount of money. We don’t often consider that it’s a thousand million. That much money could fund between 50,000 and 65,000 students for an entire school year in a typical American public school – or, alternatively, one White House ballroom.

You may have heard that our truth-challenged president suddenly understands he can no longer build his dream bunker ballroom on private funding alone, or at all. So, he’s now seeking a billion dollars in taxpayer money to fund his vanity monstrosity. This is, again, the very same project that he promised wouldn’t cost us peasants a single dime.

It wasn’t enough that this human wrecking ball of a chief executive tore down the entire East Wing of the White House after promising he wouldn’t. Now he has to fleece the populace on top of it, because you know his loyal toadies in Congress will come up with the money for their lord and master.

The fact that everything about the ballroom leading up to this moment has been fueled by lies from Trump is a given. He lies as easily as he breathes — easier actually, since drawing breaths is no longer his strong suit.

Let’s move beyond that to imagine how far a staggering amount of money like a billion dollars could go in funding an astonishing amount of public good.

Here is what you could do with it:

• Replace tens of thousands of failing lead water pipes in older cities and improve drinking water systems.
• Build hundreds of permanently affordable apartments for homeless veterans.
• Fund mobile medical clinics in rural counties with hospital shortages caused by Medicaid cutbacks.
• Retrofit public schools with modern air conditioning and heating systems.
• Reopen shuttered libraries and community centers.
• Fund free breakfast and lunch programs for entire school districts for years.
• Pay off medical debt for hundreds of thousands of families.
• Restore wetlands and flood barriers in hurricane-prone regions.
• Create addiction recovery centers in areas devastated by opioids.
• Expand Amtrak routes and modernize rail stations.
• Fund free community college tuition for thousands of students.
• Build mental health crisis centers and reduce ER overcrowding.
• Upgrade VA hospitals with modern equipment and staffing.
• Expand childcare assistance for working families.
• Build public housing for seniors on fixed incomes.
• Provide grants to struggling family farms.
• Repair aging bridges, roads, and water systems.
• Fund maternal healthcare clinics in underserved areas.
• Build addiction treatment beds instead of jail expansion.
• Upgrade prison conditions and rehab programs.
• Create job-training centers for displaced workers.
• Fund local journalism initiatives in “news desert” communities.
• Expand early childhood education and universal pre-K.
• Improve cybersecurity protections for hospitals and utilities while strengthening nationwide infrastructure.
• Expand suicide prevention hotlines and crisis response teams.
• Rebuild neglected playgrounds and recreation facilities.
• Increase legal immigration processing capacity to reduce backlogs.
• Improve airport, rail, and subway systems.
• Upgrade air traffic control and transportation safety systems.
• Hire thousands of teachers, nurses, firefighters, policemen, and social workers to reduce the burden on overworked and underfunded staff.

And this is just a drop in the bucket of what could benefit with $1 billion. The tangible needs that would go such a long way in helping make life easier and better are numerous and, by this administration, perpetually neglected.

How do Republicans justify blowing that much dough on something so ridiculously unnecessary? They don’t. But here’s why Trump seems to want it so badly: if he were to decide to challenge the idea of having to leave office at the end of his term, which we all know is possible if not probable, he could hole up in his state-of-the-art ballroom bunker designed as a below-ground living space.

What would that billion be financing? An underground hospital/bomb shelter/fortress secured with missile-resistant steel and drone-proof roofing materials. It would feature its own communication center and military command apparatus completely independent of the city above.

In other words, if you were a crazy dictator hellbent on sticking around past your expiration date, this would be exactly the kind of place you’d plan. It would have everything but its own Bunkerland McDonald’s, and I’m sure Trump would figure out a way to insert that into the blueprint, too.

The final indignity is that me and you are now the ones being tasked with footing the bill for this outrageous structure seemingly designed to protect an authoritarian and make sure he never has to relinquish power until he’s dead and gone.

Should this outrage continue to move forward, there are at least a billion reasons why Republicans should be forced to wear this around their collective necks like a scarlet “B.”

Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.