How much is a trillion dollars?

As of mid-October the Federal deficit stood at $1.4 TRILLION, more than three times last year’s deficit under the Bush administration. Current CBO projections are that as government plans stand now the deficit will top $9.1 TRILLION over the next decade, not counting any additional spending from Congress (such as the $1 trillion+ health care plan, or a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan).

Of course this is just the annual Federal deficit – the amount of NEW debt we are assuming every year. The more important number is the national debt – the amount we already owe back to someone. At the moment our national debt stands at just about $12 trillion dollars. If the Congressional Budget Office estimate of future Federal deficits is accurate, the national debt will stand at around $20 trillion ten years from now.

Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois, 1950-1969) was reputed once to have said “a billion here, a billion there – after a while it all adds up to real money”. These days we would have to change the “billion” to “trillion”.

Few of us have a good sense of what a million dollars amounts to, let alone a billion or a trillion. Remember, a billion is 1000 million. And a trillion is 1000 billion, or a million million, or $1 with twelve zeros behind it . Does that help? Probably not. Let’s put it into more concrete terms:

The US population today stands at about 308 million, so a $12 trillion Federal debt means every man, woman and child in the US owes about $75,000 today, and 10 years from now may owe about $125,000.

If you could make $1 every second ($86,400 a day, $31,5 million a year), it would take you 31,000 years to earn $1 trillion dollars, and 620,000 years to earn $20 trillion.

The government spent $383 BILLION in the last fiscal year just on interest payments on the national debt (by comparison, it spent only $53 billion on education). It our debt reaches $20 trillion, we will pay more than half a trillion dollars in interest EVERY YEAR.

With $1 trillion we could hire about 1.9 million more teachers. With $20 trillion we could hire 19 million new teachers at twice the current pay (and perhaps get twice as good teachers).

With $1 trillion we could build about 16.6 million Habitat for Humanity houses.

A major new hospital in the US costs about $50 million to build and outfit. $1 trillion would buy 20,000 major new hospitals. $20 trillion would build enough major new hospitals for the entire world.

$1 trillion is a lot of money. $20 trillion is an unimaginable amount of money. For a nation – even a wealthy nation like ours - to owe $12 trillion is a pretty heavy debt. To owe $20 trillion would be a crushing debt. This is why a lot of independents like myself are deeply worried about the profligate spending of this administration, and especially this Congress.