US BUDGET DEFICIT HITS $1.42 TRILLION! 1,000,000,000,000-In terms of money, time, population and distance-mind-boggling

I posted this article back in July, but with the deficit hitting $1.42 TRILLION for Fiscal Year 2009, I decided to repost it.

Large abstract numbers have become so common place in America that most of us have become numb to the sheer magnitude of the numbers we are dealing with. Measuring wealth by millions of dollars earned seems to be a thing of the past in the land of the Government Bailouts and Bernie Madoff’s 50 billion dollar scheme. We crossed into unprecedented territory in July 09 as the treasury department announced the trillion dollar budget deficit only nine months into the fiscal year.

Saying the word “trillion” is far easier to swallow than writing out the twelve zeros following the one. 1,000,000,000,000 is an extraordinary number, I am going to try to put meaning behind all of those zeros. Let’s take a look at how we can apply the number 1,000,000,000,000 to money, time, population and distance. Keep in mind; all of the examples given from this point forward are formulated using the most recent available statistics.

The obvious unit to measure in this case is money, considering that is what inspired me to look into this topic.

• If you stacked a trillion 1 dollar bills (.0043 inches each) the stack would tower 67,866 miles high. That is almost a third of the average distance to the moon
• If every man, women and child in America (306,915,918, US Census), regardless of age, assumed their fair portion of the deficit, we would each owe $3258.22
• If every man, women and child in the world (6,771,156,608, US Census estimate), regardless of age, assumed their fair portion of the US deficit, we would each owe $147.69
• Based on the median home value in the US ($169,000, National Association of Realtors), a trillion dollars would buy 5,917,159 homes
• The median household income in 2008 was $50,233. Based on that, it would take the average household 19,907,232 years to pay off only that debt with all of their earnings…without interest!
• At the current price of gold($30.27 million per ton as of 2/09, Wiki), $1,000,000,000,000 would buy 20% of the total gold ever mined in the world ($4.78 trillion as of 2/09)

Next we will look at what 1,000,000,000,000 means in terms of time.

• The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. If there were a planet in the universe that was 1 trillion years old, that planet would be 222 times the age of Planet Earth
• Humans (homo-sapiens) have existed on the Earth for 200,000 years. If there were a species that had survived for a trillion years, it would be 5 million times older than humans
• The average lifetime in the US is 77 years (CDC). Given that average, 12,987,012,987 lifetimes would fit into a trillion years
• The US is only 233 years old. A country that were a trillion years old would be 4,291,845,493 times older than the USA

Population may be an easier way to look at this huge number.

• The total number of species on the Earth is estimated between 10 million to 100 million species today (astrobiology.nasa.gov). Taking the higher of the two numbers, it would take 10,000 planets with similar ecosystems to equal a trillion species total
• New York City has a population of 8,360,000 people (NY Post). To fill a city with a trillion people you would need to multiply NYC’s population by 119,617 times

I saved the best for last, let’s talk distance.

• During a trillion mile trip, you could drive across the continental US (2500 miles) 400 million times, averaging 25 MPG, while burning 40 billion gallons of gas
• 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) miles would take a Boeing 747 126,160,519 times around the equator burning 5 trillion gallons of jet fuel in the process
• A trillion miles would take a space vessel from the Earth to the sun (94.51 million miles) a total of 10,580 trips

With the deficit hitting a trillion dollars for the first time in history and Obama and company rushing bills through Congress at breakneck speed, including a proposed trillion dollar health care plan for the next ten years, I hope that we all may take a step back and reevaluate our thoughts on such massive spending. The numbers that we are dealing with are staggering and truly deserve our utmost attention.