Well, bringing in budgetary considerations... not sure if this is sobering, or just throwing gas on the fire:
http://demonocracy.info/Lots of excellent graphics there to put money in perspective. However, one needs to wrap one's mind around money in terms of pallets of $100 bills and football stadiums full of pallets of money or towers of money that dwarf skyscrapers.
$2.6 billion is about 1% of the US debt annual interest payments (which is still far more than is spent on education). Or perhaps over 50,000 US jobs (which we might imagine is about 500,000 Chinese jobs).
How much is $2.6 billion? Well, if you went on a crazy spending spree shopping every day, and managed to spend $10,000 a day, it would take you over 700 years (260,000 days) to spend. Just how many big screen TVs do you need?
(But think about it - if you went to the mall, could you spend $10,000 a day - without hitting the jewelry store - in normal shopping?)
Would that have any kind of impact on this:
http://www.usdebtclock.org/Well, that's just so hopeless that it wouldn't really matter much at all.
But this kind of sounds like helping a cocaine addict stop shooting by teaching them how to crack cocaine or introducing them to meth. Hey, it's cheaper.
Or perhaps it's more like trying to resolve bankruptcy problems by getting another credit card?
Here's a pretty visualisation of the US debt as a percentage of GDP:
http://visual.ly/uni...entage-gdp-1940-2012(It's rather large, so I'll not post the image. And I'm lazy.
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Some more pretty charts:
http://www.usgovernm...art_1997_2017USb_G0fAs for simply spending as being good for jobs, well, not all spending is really equal:
https://duckduckgo.c...ood+for+economy+mythI'm all for space exploration and research, but good grief...
Wouldn't it actually be nice to be able to afford it? 
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You mean there's a difference? 
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- caution - graphic violence)