i got tired of numbers that all sound the same. "million", "billion" — same music, wildly different animals. so i drew them, at scale, along with french public spending and the fraud everyone loves to argue about.
scroll ↓ (every pixel below is to scale)
if euros don't do it for you: 1 million seconds ≈ 11.6 days. 1 billion seconds ≈ 31.7 years. 1 trillion seconds ≈ 31,700 years — the lascaux cave paintings were fresher than that.
france spent about €1,607bn of public money in 2023 (INSEE, comptes nationaux). here it is as 100 coins — each coin ≈ €16bn. hover a pile for what it actually covers.
the punchline: social protection is 53 of the 100 coins — more than half of everything. and it's not a mysterious black hole of "assistanat": it's mostly pensions (27 coins) and health (15 coins). your grandma and your hospital, basically. unemployment benefits — the thing the debate obsesses over — are about 3 coins.
ask around: which is bigger, benefit fraud (fraude sociale) or tax fraud (fraude fiscale)? people have strong feelings. let's measure instead of vibing — everything below is on one shared scale.
a little calibration gallery. exact same scale as the fraud towers — . scroll right inside the strip; french GDP is at the end. keep scrolling. no really, keep scrolling.
gridline every €100bn. yes, the €300M blockbuster is that sliver at the top — a rounding error on a rounding error.