People — and by people, I mean the Democrats in Washington and their compliant media — have been throwing around the word "trillion" as if it were no big deal.  I'm sorry — it is a very big number and a very big deal. 

Telling somebody you love them a trillion times a trillion more than they love you is not a big deal and might get you a kiss and a response that "I love you infinity."  Telling the American people that you are going to spend $6 trillion of taxed, borrowed, and printed money needs to be put into perspective.  

For some historical perspective, consider that it took over 200 years for our total national debt to hit a trillion dollars in 1982.  G.W. Bush ushered in the Great Recession as the debt blew past the $10 trillion number in 2008, twenty-six years later.  It took Obama and Biden only eight years to double that amount as they reluctantly turned over the keys to Donald Trump, who was no fiscal conservative himself.  Today, we are looking in the rearview mirror at $28 trillion for those who track it daily, and Biden, Schumer and Pelosi have plans to commit spending another ten trillion dollars of other people's money over the next year. 

With that historical perspective, it is still hard to get a good understanding of just how big those numbers are.  To cover up the enormousness of this figure, the media (and I, I'll admit) find ways to minimize the size of a trillion.  We avoid writing it out in numbers because there are just so many zeroes.  Just look at it: $28,000,000,000,000.  Compare that to the much smaller and much more relatable median household income number of around $50,000.  Sometimes we don't even want to recognize the word "trillion" itself, and we shorten it to the much more palatable T.  Visually, $28T is much less intimidating than $28,000,000,000,000.  It definitely takes up a lot less room in the text. 

So we soft-sell trillions to the public with Ts and trillions, but such a mind-blowing number deserves some visual perspective when attaching it to taxpayer dollars.  

My favorite is by visualizing stacks of dollar bills.  One hundred freshly minted one-dollar bills stack 233 to an inch.  Our current occupier of the Oval Office is proposing $6 trillion in new spending, so we'll work off his figure.  He would like us to ignore the number and concentrate on how all the wealthy people will be paying for it.  But to put that number into perspective, think of a stack of $1.00 bills six trillion high.  The stack would be 406,425 miles high.  It's hard to visualize a stack of anything that tall, so to put that in perspective, the stack of that many dollar bills would extend to the moon and then wrap around the moon four times.  That's a lot of dollar bills, and Joe, that's a lot of money. 

Maybe visualizing in terms of height isn't sinking in.  Consider six trillion dollar bills stacked end-to-end. It would extend to Mars and back twice.  With another 1.7 trillion one-dollar bills, it would reach Saturn but only once.  A stack of that many quarters would go 13 million miles up. Lying side by side, those quarters would go around the world 3,803 times at the equator.  Jumping back to dollar bills, six trillion George Washingtons lying on the ground looking at that stack of quarters that coincidentally but irrelevantly have his face on them also, would cover the entire state of West Virginia.  This doesn't include lakes, because we wouldn't want that money to get soggy.  And just for fun, that much money in nickels would weigh almost as much as twenty Empire State Buildings! 

Now for the real scary fact about our Big Spender in Chief's six-trillion-dollar giveaway.  Remember that $50,000 median annual income figure above.  Six trillion dollars equates to about $46,700 per household in America, or about enough for the median income family to take the year off.  If that doesn't qualify as a socialist redistribution of wealth plan, I don't know what does.

As you can now fully visualize, I hope, no matter how casually you talk about it, nor how you write it, $6,000,000,000,000 (or six trillion dollars, or $6 trillion, or $6T) is a very big number and should not be addressed casually by power-hungry politicians.  A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there...pretty soon we're talking about real money. 

Image via Max Pixel.

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