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Friday, March 13, 2009

What's in a Trillion?

Others have done this kind of stuff. I tried doing some figuring on my own. How do you break down a trillion dollars? How much is a trillion ... anything?

One trillion seconds ago would have been about 32,000 years ago (read "prehistoric"). One trillion hours ago would have been more than 19,000 centuries past.

If you started a company in the year 0 AD (as if you could) and that company earned a net $1 million a day, your company would only have made $734 billion by the year 2009. It would take until 2734 (or so) to make a trillion dollars.

If the government was just to distribute the money to the American people, everyone would receive roughly $3300. (What do you suppose a family of 4 could do with a combined $13,000?) If they decided instead to distribute it to households, each household would get about $9000. If they decided to distribute it to people paying mortgages, each mortgagee would get over $13,000.

According to the CIA World Factbook, Australia's gross domestic product (GDP) is slightly more than a trillion dollars. It's more than the combined GDP of Norway and Sweden and slightly less than the combined GDP of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and the United Arab Emirates (you know ... the big oil countries).

But let's say we just got frivolous and strung together one trillion $1 bills. The string would go about 95 million miles. That's the distance to the Sun.

No, frivolous is stupid. (Spending a trillion dollars is not, right?) Let's say that we wanted to do nice things with it. The government could pay off every student loan and only have spend half the trillion. To feed the world's estimated 840 million chronically malnourished people would cost another $24 billion. Not even close to consuming that money.

Or how about this? There are approximately 922 million people in Africa. Family sizes average about 6. It costs an average of $32 a month to feed a family in Africa. A trillion dollars, then, could feed the entire continent of Africa for 17 years.

According to the USDA, last year it cost an average of $270 per month to feed the average male a normal amount of food (not too much, not too little). Without adjusting for gender or age (it costs less to feed women and children), a trillion dollars would feed every man, woman, and child in America for an entire year ... with money left over to pay off those same pesky student loans and feed those same malnourished people.

I'm sorry. After awhile that "trillion" number just gets too big to think about.

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