The commentary quoted below from the Wall Street Journal (“Feel Like a Trillion Bucks”) caught my attention. How much is a trillion?
The human mind is not well equipped to fathom a number that large. A check for $1 trillion — a million million dollars — would have 12 zeros to the left of the decimal point. Homo sapiens hadn’t evolved a trillion seconds ago: 31,546 years in the past, Neanderthals were still trying to make fire.
More immediately, $1 trillion is about one-third of annual U.S. government spending and 13% of the U.S. economy. It is more than the GDP of all but 12 countries in 2007 (America, Japan, Germany, China, the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Russia and India, in that order).
A thousand billion. A million million! We are tossing that number around in reference to the government bailout without grasping its meaning. It’s as if you took $100,000 from 10,000,000 people, or $10,000 from 100,000,000 people. It’s a lot.
