How Much is One Trillion Dollars?
March 13th, 2009It’s official, trillion is the new billion. The U.S. Congress is no longer spending our taxpayer money in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government bailouts and stimulus packages, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all.
One trillion dollars; it’s a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. There have been attempts to put this number into perspective before. A trillion one-dollar-bills laid end to end would reach the sun; or you spend one dollar per second for 32,000 years; or one trillion dollars in pennies would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses (the largest known dinosaur). Fanciful as this may be, the real story behind one trillion dollars is in its economic impact. Mint.com investigates what one trillion dollars can do.
