How much is a Trillion Dollars?

Politicians and the media avoid startling us by explaining what “7 or 8 Trillion Dollars” denotes, and so we turn to the occasional blogger, myself included, who attempt to provide a handle on what these colossal figures represent. For example:

• If you had 7.4 trillion pennies, you would have $74,000,000,000, an amount sufficient to buy the New York Times Co. 86 times over.
• 7.4 trillion pennies would stack up 4,671,717 miles high. That's enough to go to the moon and back ten times.
• Just 1 Trillion dollars equals all the assets of all American banks.
• $ 7.7 Trillion is conservatively nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures.
• This amount could instead pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.
• Oh yes, and to come up with this $8.5 Trillion, each American citizen is involuntarily kicking in $27,851!
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OK, so you get the picture? Here’s another angle you shoppers might relate to.

Spending $1,000 per second, it would take almost three decades to spend 1 trillion dollars! (–And obviously 1 Trillion is only a fraction of $8.5 trillion being offered on our behalf.)

Applying a “trillion” to Time,

1 second multiplied by a Trillion = 31,700 years!

Might that be an indicator how long it may take the children of our children’s offspring to begin to pay off the National Debt?!

See also