Not too long ago, I saw a headline in our paper that got my attention. It said, "Senate passes $1.1 trillion bill."
Like most old guys, I sometimes have too much time on my hands and I began to wonder how much that actually was. When politicians casually toss around numbers like a trillion they never write it out in actual numbers. Written in digits, the title of today's column is what a trillion looks like. That's right; it's a one with 12 zeros behind it.
Most of us deal in hundreds or maybe thousands. That old pickup truck might have 150,000 miles on it.
We can even grasp the size of a million. For example, there are almost 10 million people in our great state of Michigan. TV shows like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and "Deal or No Deal" expand our concept of dollars by the million.
Some of us dream of winning a million dollars in the lottery and retiring to a tropical island in the Caribbean.
However, most of us never encounter numbers beyond a million.
There are a few individuals who deal with billions. At last count, there were about 793 people worldwide who had a net worth of a billion dollars or more and about half of them live in the United States. This speaks volumes about the free enterprise system. The opportunity to succeed does exist for those willing to work hard and take risks. Good examples are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey.
For the average individual, a billion is difficult to comprehend and not many of us will ever confront a billion of anything. If a schoolboy were to stare at the seconds ticking away on the schoolroom clock waiting for the bell to ring, it would take 31 years before a billion seconds passed by. A billion hours ago, man had not yet walked on the face of the earth. A billion dollars in $100 bills stacked one on top of another, would be a pile 3,580 feet tall. To put that in perspective, the world's tallest man-made structure is the Burj Dubai, a building in the United Arab Emirates, which stands at 2,684 feet in height. Your billion-dollar stack of $100 bills would tower over it by nearly 1,000 feet.
Trying to comprehend a trillion makes a billion look like pocket change. The goal of this column is to try and relate to a trillion. My desire is to put it in terms that we can all understand. For example, our country hasn't existed for one trillion seconds. In fact, western civilization hasn't even been around for a trillion seconds.
The schoolboy watching the seconds tick away on the classroom clock would have to sit there for 31,688 years before a trillion seconds passed. That takes us back to the days of cavemen wandering around the plains of Europe.
A trillion is a huge and nearly impossible number to comprehend. Let's put it in perspective with some interesting comparisons. The population of California is 36 million people. One trillion people would equal 27,777 states the size of California. Texas is approximately 270,000 square miles in area. One trillion square miles would equal 3.7 million Texas-size states.
One trillion square miles would equal the dry land found on 20 Earths! If you wanted to belong to the "Trillion Mile Club," you would have to travel around the earth 40 million times.
Let's think about a trillion in terms of money. If a trillion dollars composed of one-dollar bills were laid end-to-end, the chain of bills would reach from the Earth to the sun and 4 million miles beyond.
If the 1 trillion dollars were in $100 bills instead of $1 bills it would make things a little more manageable. Let's say those $100 bills were stacked next to each other and then laid down along the edge of a road. If you jumped into that old pickup truck and started driving alongside the fortune, you would drive for 789 miles before reaching the end of the money.
With 1 trillion dollars it would be possible to purchase Coca-Cola, Apple, IBM, Bank of America, Ford, GM, Toyota, Motorola, AT&T, Exxon Mobile, and still have billions left over to live on, not counting the profits from the companies purchased.
Now consider this sobering thought. It's like the cold, wet washcloth of reality slapping us in the face. Our current national debt is more than $12 trillion and climbing by the second. This staggering number equals $39,500 of debt for every man, woman and child in our country. We are staring into an abyss that should concern us all. How can our nation continue to spend these vast sums of money and who is going to pay it all back?
Ed Hungness and his wife owned their cottage on Fife Lake for six years before moving there after his retirement in 2005. He can be reached at edhungness@yahoo.com. For more of Ed's columns, log on to record-eagle.com/edhungness.
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