Friday, February 20, 2009

Define "trillion..."

Came across this article, and thought it raised a good point that Americans largely don't comprehend the vastness of the dollar figures being bandied about by our Dear Leaders these days. So here's some context:
First analogy: If someone spent one million dollars per day each and every day since Jesus was born, it would take another 731 years (beyond today) before one trillion dollars was spent.

  • $1,000,000,000,000 ((12 zeros, folks!))/ $1,000,000 per day
  • = one million days
  • one million days / 365 = 2740 years
  • 2740 - 2009 = 731 (years remaining)

Second analogy looks at a million, a billion, and a trillion in terms of seconds. One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years!

The third analogy puts dollar bills end to end. If you laid one dollar bills end to end, 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!

But the last analogy is the one that absolutely blows my mind. If you took freshly minted brand new $1,000 dollar bills and starting stacking them one on top of another, it would take a stack over 68 miles high to reach one trillion dollars!

Now, consider that The Chosen One admits we are likely to run annual deficits of at least a trillion dollars for the next few years. Yeah, that'll do wonders for our purchasing power. Get out of the dollar. Now.

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