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A TRILLION DOLLARS TAXES THE MIND AND THE TAXPAYERby Jim Abrams
Thinking of counting to a trillion one second per number? Better get
started. It will take 31,688 years. The US government closed its 2009
fiscal year with a record 1.416-trillion-dollar budget deficit and …
And tack on a few more years if you want to go for 1.35 trillion, the
dollar estimate for the federal deficit in the current 2010 year. The
whole sum could be taken care of if every American, all 300 million of
them, forked over $4,500.
Back in 1981, President Ronald Reagan, characterizing the national
debt as it approached $1 trillion, commented that "a trillion dollars
would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high." The debt, the
accumulation of annual deficits, now stands at more than $12 trillion.
Put another way, the $1.35 trillion could pay for 40,000 players
likeAlex Rodriguez, whose $33 million salary in 2009 made him
baseball'srichest man. Or think the $6.25 billion paid out by Goldman
Sachs in salaries and bonuses in 2009 was a lot of money? The federal
deficit could support the payroll of 216 such financial firms.
A trip around the world at the equator is about 25,000 miles. So 1.35
trillion miles would be a dizzying 54 million circuits around the
globe. A trillion is one followed by 12 zeros.
The Washington Monument, overlooking the deficit debate in the
Capitol, stands about 555 feet tall. Stacked end to end, it would take
more than 2.4 billion monuments to reach 1.35 trillion feet. That's
well more than double the distance from the Earth to the sun.
Being sat on by a 10,000-pound bull elephant would not be pleasant.
What about if 135 million pachyderms were piled up?
The Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. A long time
until you consider that 1.35 trillion years equals 300 Earth lives.
Looking at more modern history, 1.35 trillion seconds would take us
back more than 40,000 years, when Neanderthals were using stones to
make tools.
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