One Trillion Dollars!
Sometimes it is hard to get your mind around a number. The numbers that have been thrown around in the bailout and stimulus bills are those kinds of numbers. As Richard Feynman said:
There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
Every one has a hard time when we start working with orders of magnitude or log scales. There is the classic “Powers of Ten” movie that has been around for ages.
So here is a great visual representation of what a trillion dollars looks like. Go ahead and click through, it is mind boggling. That’s $1,000,000,000,000.00, a number that has been reached in not only bailout totals, but also in the stimulus bill totals. So we aren’t even talking about just one trillion. I hope nobody thinks this is real money.
And it isn’t just the current federal administration that is spending like drunken sailors, because here is a graphic that compares the bailout money from Bush’s last months in office to other large spending programs, all in adjusted 2008 dollars, so we are comparing apples to apples. And the numbers come from this.
