It's A Lot Of Bucks

By Bill Korbel

When you hear about trillion dollar government bailouts, can you even begin to comprehend how much money that really is?  For most of us, it's impossible, which may be exactly what the government wants.  Million, billion, trillion.  They all sound the same and all end in "illion".  If you write out the numbers it starts to make an impact.  Instead of saying one trillion dollars, how about writing $1,000,000,000,000.00.   It starts to look impressive, but still essentially incomprehensible.  Try this.  Start counting dollar bills.  Count one every second.  In one year you will have counted $31,536,000.  It would take 27.4 years counting day and night to get to 1 billion.  One trillion would take 27,400 years.  Change the dollar bills to hundreds and it would still take 274 years of counting.

Still, I don't think this makes a big enough impact.  Lets look at a more visual way of comprehending one trillion dollars.  For this I thank the web site 87billion.com.  They did most of the calculations for me, thereby saving me a lot of time.

One dollar is roughly 6" long and 2 1/2" wide.  If you place six together they are about the size of a standard 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper.

   

$3,000 is the size of a ream of paper (500 sheets)

  

Now, lets start piling these stacks of $3,000 on each other.  $9 million dollars would be a pile of dollar bills 10 feet long, 6 1/4 feet wide and 5 feet tall

So, how big a pile would one trillion dollars make?  How about something 125 feet wide, 250 feet long and 1,350 feet tall.  That's taller then the Empire State Building.  Stacked one on top of another the pile of dollar bills would be 59,664 miles tall.  That's 1/4th of the way to the Moon.  That, my friends, is what a trillion dollars really is. Keep that picture in mind as you hear more about our fiscal mess and maybe it'll make some sense to those of us who live in the real world.

Comments

[John]

I prefer the nonvisual but more tangible approach. Since there are about three hundred million Americans:

One billion dollars could give everybody in the country three bucks or, say, a carton of eggs.

One trillion works out to three thousand dollars per person or a really high-end computer system per American.

The nine trillion that have been promised across all the bailouts including the Obama stimulus? Almost thirty thousand dollars per person, or the equivalent of giving a luxury car for every man, woman, and child in this country.

(Of course, it's taxpayer money going to companies, so it's more like taking these things from each person...but you get the idea.)