Understanding a trillion dollars
The Obama stimulus package is said to be close to a trillion dollars. How do we make sense out of this? How does one visualize a trillion?
- A trillion dollars = $1,000,000,000,000. - 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point.
- The U.S. government spends more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Australia, China and Spain combined.
- If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills.
- One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun.
- It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.
Interestingly, there is a U.S. National Debt Clock that reflects how much is owed by the government by the day.
Scary!
ReplyDeleteThere is a NYT article on the US debt today (see http://euandus3.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/12-trillion-in-debt-living-beyond-our-means/). It hasn't been just after the financial crisis of 2008 that the US Government has had unbalanced annual budgets... And consider consumer "use" of credit cards? Is there something about our society--about ourselves--that we are missing because we are in it? (e.g. a fish doesn't "see" its water). I don't think we are digging deep enough.
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