The Angry White Guy

How much is a TRILLION?

Posted February 28th 2009 at 9:15 pm by AWG

deficit_0108 I really don’t believe people can get their mind around a trillion dollars. After all a trillion is a big number, but how big is it?

A trillion is a one followed by twelve zeros – 1,000,000,000,000

There is 6.6 billion people on the planet and some say that’s too many, well a trillion is a million million or a thousand billion. A trillion is big, really big, really, really big number and it’s mind numbing to think of it and our glorious government is burning through money faster then the presses can print it. A trillion is number few people can truly understand, it’s really a number few of will ever need to use in everyday life.

Well many have tried to define a trillion, here are a few examples.

$1 trillion was the cost of the entire Federal Budget in 1987.
In 2007, Microsoft generated $51 billion in revenue — that’s sales, not profits. To reach a trillion dollars in revenue, we’d need 20 Microsofts.
A box that holds a case of copier paper will hold about $72,000 one-dollar bills. It would take 1.4 billion boxes to hold a trillion dollars.
It would take 1.8 trillion pennies to fill the Empire State Building.
$1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States.
If you spent $1 million an hour, non-stop for 24 hours a day, you wouldn’t run out of money for 411 years.
If you took 3.6 trillion one-dollar bills, and placed them end-to-end, that line of bills would reach from Capitol Hill to the sun and then back to Capitol Hill and then back to the sun – and then almost all the way back to Capitol Hill again.
That’s one out of every four dollars produced in the U.S. It’s 25 percent of the GDP
The country has not existed for a trillion seconds.
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds.
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
If you have one dollar bills stacked face to back and laid them on there side, it would circle the globe at the equator 10 times.
It’s a $1 million a day since the birth of Christ or the year Zero plus another 737 years to go.
U.S. One trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans comes out to $3,333
A tightly-packed stack of new $100 bills totaling $1 million would be about 4 feet high. A billion dollars, 4,000 feet high or equivalent to about three Sears Towers stacked on top of one another. That means a stack of $100 bills totaling $1 trillion would be 789 miles or 144 Mt. Everests stacked on top of one another.
To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.

Another way of looking at it from “Pick Wayne’s Brain”

Let’s start with money. Let’s imagine that you have a fantastic job that pays you one dollar for every second you work. (As you will see, there are people who get paid more than that.) There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. If you were only getting paid for as 40-hour work week for all 52 weeks of the year, you would still be getting paid $7,488,000 in a year. And if you were getting your $1/sec rate for every second of the year, you would take in $31,536,000 for the entire year. At that rate, to earn a trillion dollars, you would have to work more than 31,709 years! And even if they magnanimously paid you $1,000/sec, it would still take you more than 31 years to earn that first $1 Trillion. They say the war in Iraq is costing taxpayers about $2 Billion dollars per week. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week for a total of 604,800 seconds per week. At $2 Billion per week, the Iraq War costs us over $3,000 every second! Can I borrow a couple of bucks for the rent this month?

Are you getting the idea?

A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians can use the term in conversation… probably because they
seldom think about what they are really saying. I’ve read that mathematicians do not even use the term trillion!

At some point we’ve got to pay this debt, I’d suggest starting with cutting entitlements.

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