Now For A Trillion

If you've been following my lead on the billion dollar postings below, you're ready for what a trillion is. Make sure you're sitting down.

A trillion dollars = $1,000,000,000,000.

That's 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars.

If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would have taken you until October 2737 to lose just ONE trillion dollars.

It would take two thousand, seven hundred and thirty seven years - losing one million dollars a day - to lose one trillion dollars.

BUT... The U.S. Congress has done seven times this damage to their constituents in a little over eighteen years!

If our federal government stays on the course it's been on for the past forty years without a radical change, the federal government will have a $10 TRILLION BUDGET by the year 2010.

As it stands today, The total debt obligation of the United States - private and public - now exceeds 46 TRILLION DOLLARS.

Incredible. Beyond incredible.