Most people have difficulty envisioning a million, putting it into
any sort of working perspective -- but say a billion and they glaze over in
incomprehension.
A billion is one thousand millions;
a trillion is one thousand, thousand millions.
Consider the U.S. National Debt of $5 and a half trillion-plus and mounting:
If that debt was a fund that could be broken down and returned by Congressional
district, each district's share would be an immediate $10 billion windfall. Could your
Congressional district find a good use for an extra $10 billion this year?
For Massachusetts, that amounts to $100 billion -- enough to fund even this year's
bloated state budget for 5 years without a cent of state taxes or federal revenue
reimbursements.
Instead, it is a $10 billion debt per Congressional district -- money
we taxpayers owe on top of what the IRS already has extracted from each of us --
thanks to Congressional borrowing.
If every dollar in state revenue were used just to pay down the National Debt, it
would take Massachusetts five years of all revenue collected to pay off our
share.
If we stipulate that a million dollars, made up of a thousand $1,000 bills, would
create a stack of tightly-banded bills six-inches thick, then:
A billion dollars (a thousand tightly-banded 6" stacks of $1,000 bills)
would rise 500 feet high (the length of one-and-two-thirds football fields), and;
A trillion dollars (a thousand thousand tightly-banded 6" stacks of
$1,000 bills) would tower almost 95 miles (94.69) into the sky, or further than the
distance between Boston and Springfield.
Put another way, if we had started paying off the national debt at the rate of a
million dollars a day, every day of the week including weekends and holidays, since the
day Christ was born (about 729,000 days ago), we would be close to paying off the FIRST
TRILLION DOLLARS (And that doesn't take into consideration any compounding interest.)
National Debt History
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