ANOTHER WAY TO (TRY TO) COMPREHEND ONE TRILLION

Roman Around ^ | 10 February 2009 | Andrew Roman

[andrew roman]

The Senate is on the brink of passing President Obama's cavalcade of pig-meat.

With the word "trillion" being tossed around these days like hiccups at a Kennedy family barbecue, the very magnitude of how much that really is can be easily lost on the human brain.

A few days ago, Senator Mitch McConnell gave a marvelous example of how large "one trillion" actually is by saying that if one had spent $1 million a day since the day Jesus was born, he or she would still not have reached a trillion dollars.

That's hard to ingest.

A caller to Dennis Prager's radio show yesterday may have come up with an even more effective way of illustrating how big a trillion is.

[Dutchboy88]

Not to be obtuse, but the whole “time” thing doesn’t help me. If you earn, say, $ 4,000 a month, how many seconds does that take to spend at the rate they are spending, and so forth. For me, the fact that someone noted that the total bill would pay off all the mortgages in America was the clincher.