Wrapping Your Mind Around a Trillion Dollars

In the 1960s, a Republican Senator named Everett McKinley Dirksen was rumored to have said about the federal budget, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money!”

Dirksen died in 1969, but he’d be rolling over in his grave if he knew the United States government last week reached its debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion. While Democrats and Republicans are debating now about raising that ceiling and cutting spending, now’s a good time to understand just how much money they’re talking about.

Here’s how Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson explained $1 trillion in the following 2009 news story…

As Stacy pointed out in the video above, $1 trillion would send every high schooler in the United States to college. Here are some other ways to visualize this otherworldly sum…

A trillion dollars would:

• Buy every household in America a 73-inch HDTV – and then buy them a second one.
• Pay the rent for every renter in the United States for three years, or the mortgage of every homeowner in the country for 14 months.
• Buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States.
• If you spent $1 million every day, it would take you 3,000 years to reach $1 trillion.
• If you want to see what $1 trillion looks like, click here for a computer-generated photo of $100 bills stacked onto industrial-sized pallets.
• A trillion dollar bills laid end to end would reach the sun.
• A stack of $1,000 bills would be 67.9 miles high.
• A trillion dollars in one dollar bills would weigh about 1.1 million tons, or 2.2 billion pounds.
• It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of $1 bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion $1 bills.

Now multiply everything you just read above by 14, and you have our national debt ceiling.