It’s official, trillion is the new billion. No longer is government spending talked about in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government spending, 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 dollar bills laid end to end would reach the sun or you spend a 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. Let’s investigate what one trillion dollars can do.
For more personal finance visualizations see: WallStats.com