A good friend emailed me today and said she and her husband saw this bumper sticker on a car in front of them as they were leaving church today. If you can’t laugh you have to cry. The bumper sticker said: “I hope nobody tells Obama what comes after a trillion.” She then said “What does come after a trillion? I don’t even know what a trillion is.”
It is difficult to visualize just how many dollars there are in just $1 billion. The politicians who are spending fortunes in government money make it sound as though they are dealing in smaller numbers by removing quite a few digits. To put it into perspective, a billion is a thousand million.
- To place it in a better perspective, a billion seconds ago, it was the year 1959, the year I was born.
- Humans first learned to write 252 billion seconds ago.
- A billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive.
- A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
- A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate Washington spends it.
So, just what does one TRILLION dollars look like? Well, starting out in smaller numbers, 1,000 Thousands equals 1 Million (1,000,000). 1,000 Millions equals 1 Billion (1,000,000,000). 1,000 Billions equals 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000). A Trillion can also be thought of as a Million Millions. So how can anyone relate to such a mind-numbing number like one Trillion?
Well, some time back I received this information in one of those email that float around your inbox and so I searched to find the author, but instead found this posted on several websites, without any credit to the author to be found. So for discussion purposes, the math appears correct and so I share this with you.
All this talk about “stimulus packages” and “bailouts”…
- A billion dollars…
- A hundred billion dollars…
- Eight hundred billion dollars…
- One TRILLION dollars…
We’ll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. These are guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.
One Hundred Dollars
A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2″ thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of extravagant fun.
Ten Thousand Dollars
Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.
A Million Dollar Pile
While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet…
$100 million dollars
And $1 BILLION dollars… now we’re really getting somewhere…
$1 BILLION dollars
Next we’ll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we’ve been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it’s a million million. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a one followed by 12 zeros.
Are you ready for this?
It is pretty surprising.
Go ahead…
Scroll down…
Ladies and gentlemen… I give you $1 trillion dollars…
One Trillion Dollars
Notice those pallets are double stacked, …and remember those are $100 bills.
One commentator said it this way: “imagine that you have a fantastic job that pays you one dollar for every second you work. There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. If you were only getting paid for as 40-hour work week for all 52 weeks of the year, you would still be getting paid $7,488,000 in a year. And if you were getting your $1.00 per second rate for every single second of the year, you would earn $31,536,000 for the entire year. At that rate, to earn a trillion dollars, you would have to work more than 31,709 years! And even if they generously paid you $1,000 per second, it would still take you more than 31 years to earn that first $1 Trillion.
So the next time you hear some politician toss around the phrase “trillion dollars”… that’s what they’re talking about.
Now check out the US National Debt Clock
