How Much is a Trillion Dollars?

February 26, 2009
The 787 billion dollar stimulus bill that was passed by Congress and signed by the President last week will cost American taxpayers about one trillion dollars over the next ten years when you include interest.  To most people, a million dollars is a lot of money, a billion dollars is an absolutely enormous amount of money, and a trillion dollars is an almost unimaginable sum.  To politicians, it seems like a million dollars of taxpayer money is barely pocket change, a billion dollars is just a night out on the town, and the merits of spending one trillion of our tax dollars is not even worth debating over. 

Since it is difficult for most people to even fathom just how much a trillion of anything is, here are some facts and comparisons that will help you put it into perspective.

If you make the U.S. median income of $48,200 a year, you would have to work for more than 20 million years (20,746,888 years) in order to earn a trillion dollars.

The civilian labor force in the U.S. consists of about 154 million people and if the cost of the trillion dollar stimulus bill was divided equally among them, each would have to pay an additional $6,494 in taxes.

There are about 306 million men, women, and children residing in the U.S. and if the cost of the trillion dollar stimulus bill was divided equally among them, each would have to pay an additional $3,268 in taxes.

There are about 6.76 billion human beings currently living on the earth and one trillion dollars divided equally among them would be about $148 each.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day and 31,536,000 seconds in a year (ignoring leap years).  One trillion seconds is equal to a few weeks short of 31,710 years (31,709.792 years).

All U.S. currency is a standard size of 2.61 inches by 6.14 inches.  Each note is approximately .0043 inches thick and weighs about .0352739619 ounces.

Using the metric system, U.S. notes are 6.63 cm by 15.6 cm and each note is approximately .010922 cm thick and weighs about 1 gram.

One trillion $1 bills would weigh over one million tons (1,102,311 tons).

If you stack a trillion $1 bills on top of each other, it would be a little more than 67,866 miles tall.

If you laid one trillion $1 bills end to end, it would be almost 96,906,566 miles long.

The circumference of the Earth at the equator is about 24,902 miles.

One trillion $1 bills stacked on top of each other would stretch all the way around the equator twice and you would have 18,062 miles of bills worth more than 266 billion dollars left over ($266,141,469,767).

One trillion $1 bills laid end to end would stretch all the way around the equator 3,891 times and you would have 12,884 miles of bills worth nearly 133 million dollars left over ($132,953,808).

The distance to the moon is about 230,000 miles.

One trillion $1 bills laid end to end would stretch all the way from the Earth to the moon and back 210 times and you would have 306,566 miles of bills worth more than 3 billion dollars left over ($3,163,521,459).

The distance to the Sun is one Astronomical Unit (AU), about 93,000,000 miles.

One trillion $1 bills laid end to end would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Sun and you would have 3,906,506 miles of bills worth more than 40 billion dollars left over ($40,312,703,974).

Now that you have an idea of just how much a trillion dollars is, think about this - total government spending this year will likely be well over $4.25 trillion and the budget deficit for this year will probably be more than $2 trillion.  That is not only our tax dollars they are spending, it is our children's and their children's tax dollars as well.