Government Spending: A Real Look At A Trillion Dollars

At Wealthononomics we discuss a lot of topics, but the one that everyone is extremely familiar with is government spending. We hear about it all the time on the tv, radio, etc. When we talk about our debt, we talk about trillions of dollars, but to most, a trillion dollars is nothing more than a word.

The purpose of my post today is nothing more than to illustrate some very interesting characteristics of 1 Trillion dollars, and then give you a visual of what that looks like.

First of all, a “Trillion” is a 1 with 12 zeros, it looks like this: $1,000,000,000,000.

Here are some characteristics:

- If the printing presses ran from 8-5 every working day, 5 days a week, it would take 72 years to print 1 trillion dollar bills.

- Stacked on top of one another a trillion dollar bills would be 70,000 miles high.

- You would have had to spend over 1.3 million dollars per day since the birth of Christ (2011 years ago) to spend a Trillion dollars.

- One million seconds ago was 10 or 11 days ago
One billion seconds ago was during the Nixon administration
One trillion seconds ago was 30,000 years BC.

- If your annual salary or wage is $50,000 it would take you 20 million years to earn a trillion dollars.

- We could wrap the earth about 4700 times with a trillion one-dollar bills laid end to end around the globe.

The Visual

So those are some interesting facts, but in my opinion the visual is even more intriguing.

Here’s a comparison of a trillion dollars as it relates to you or me.

Let’s start with $1 million dollars.

Next we have $100 million dollars. This can be neatly stacked on a pallet about 4 feet high.

Now we have $1 Billion dollars. This is 10 pallets of $100 million each. This used to be a lot of money…

HERE IS 1 TRILLION DOLLARS!

A trillion dollars is compiled of 10,000 pallets (double stacked so they are about 8 feet high) and each pallet has 100 million dollars on it.

Notice the man in the left corner…

As you can see, a trillion dollars is a lot of money. As for another interesting fact, we have added over 1 trillion dollars every year to our national debt for the last 5 consecutive years. This misuse of our tax dollars is causing serious burdens on our economic growth, and could ultimately be the cause of slow economic growth for years to come. We welcome your comments.