Too Big to Comprehend

Wednesday night the presidential debaters tossed around the figure of $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars or a one followed by twelve zeroes) as if it were no great thing.   I guess they were right.  It's not any more.  Especially when we are now annually racking up fiscal year deficits of well over $1 trillion and the total amount of money we owe to ourselves and others is approaching $17 trillion.

Mark Steyn, political pundit and commentator, has observed that the word trillion used to be used solely in the context of interstellar travel.  How else does one measure great distances without huge numbers.  But now, we've reduced it to casually referring to the amount of debt with which we've burdened ourselves.  Steyn quips that we've normally left the word trillion to the realm of Carl Sagan and talking about distances from here to the planet Zongo.  But,  no more.  We've brought it in to common usage and that's a scary thing.

The vice president, Joe Biden, spoke this week at a campaign event and assured Americans that "darn right we're going to raise taxes and collect $1 trillion."  Yeesh!  It's almost like he was referring to a girl scout cookie drive.   $1 trillion?  Easy.  Call me when you have a challenge!

I don't think the vice president, or quite a few of the people he serves, have one iota of an idea of what a trillion dollars is.   You may think you do, but you don't.   The picture attached to this article gives some sense of what a trillion dollars would look like if you could stack $100 dollar bills on pallets two high in some warehouse somewhere.

Here's some other ways to look at it.   A dollar is six inches in length.  If you lined up one trillion dollars end to end,  they'd stretch all the way to our sun and a little bit beyond.  About 94,000,000 miles away.   If you went to the mall and tried to spend one trillion dollars at the rate of one million dollars per hour you'd have to hang around at Macy's and Abercrombie and Fitch for a little over 115 years.  That's the definition of a mall rat for sure.  If you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of one another they'd reach the lofty height of 68,000 feet which is twice as high as jet liners fly and just about touching the edge of space.

The national debt, as I have pointed out, is a little over $16 trillion.  If you think $1 trillion is a number you can't comprehend, $16 trillion is a number that will explode your brain.   In fact, if each dollar represented a mile was laid end to end and you wished to travel from dollar one to the sixteen trillionth dollar and did so at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second),  it would take you only 164 years to get there.  Physics won't allow you to move anywhere close to the speed of light but to make the timeframe reasonable, we're going to have to assume you can do it.  By the time you got back to earth, we'd be long gone but America probably would have rung about another $368 trillion in debt assuming we keep our spending rate reasonable and cap it at a mere $1 trillion per year.

We've just closed out this fiscal year and we've spent another $1.3 trillion more than we've taken in in revenue.  If you did that with your personal finances, you'd be in jail.  But, the government, which conveniently prints its own money and can borrow from itself as well, doesn't really have to worry about such inconvenient things as balancing budgets or fiscal soundness.   But, if we really had to and bore down to pay off our debt, the fact is that we need to come up with $16 trillion to do it.  Even then, we'd be back to just being broke.  No money in the till.  Nothing to show for $16 trillion of effort.   That may be something you might be able to comprehend but, like me, I am sure you're depressed about it nonetheless.