Seriously, How Much Is a Trillion?

I’ve been perusing the Internets trying to find a nice, visual idea of a (US) trillion dollars. It’s really hard to find. Go on, look at Wikipedia. You’ll be sorely disappointed. However, I found a guy who explained the concept in pretty recognizable terms here.

Here’s a modified version of the visual amount of 1 trillion dollars. And it involves something most of us do every day: drive!

So let’s say you have a $100 bill. A stack of $100 that reaches 40 inches in height (just slightly taller than height of a typical desk or table) would total $1 million dollars. So you gather that amount of cash and toss it in the trunk of your car and you begin driving from your house. Now let’s say that you live close to the freeway/interstate and as soon as you enter the on-ramp, instead of the white line on the shoulder you see $100 bills stacked sideways along the side of the road. The distance 1 trillion dollars would cover almost 680 miles—that’s the distance from Atlanta to Baltimore, or New York City to Flint, MI.


That’s only 1 trillion. The US GDP (economic output of the US) is $13.8 trillion per year. We currently have debt obligations (to other countries, Medicare/Medicaid, and Social Security) of over 54 trillion. And as I mentioned before, we have committed about 8.5 trillion to help “save the economy” over the next two years, pending a stimulus package that will total 500-700 billion over 2 years, and we haven’t started talking about universal health care plans yet. For all the economists out there who say debt doesn’t matter and we need to spend our way out of this—let see what happens.