A Trillion is a BIG Number

In discussing the proposed financial institution bailout in his column yesterday Dr Thomas Sowell said that "many people have trouble even forming some notion of what such numbers as billion and trillion mean." To get some idea of the magnitude of a trillion he suggests thinking about it in terms of what was going on in the world a trillion seconds ago. The answer is not much. No one on the planet knew how to read. That could have been because no one knew how to write. It was over 31,709 years ago. I suspect there were no politicians around back then.

If you could earn a dollar a second (that's $3,600 per hour) and worked 24/7 with no sleep or vacations it would take you over 31,709 years to earn a trillion dollars. You would be earning over $32 million per year but it would still take you more than 31,709 years to earn a trillion dollars. If you don't think you can work that long and if you can recruit 31,708 people with the same earning ability to help out, you can earn the trillion dollars in about a year.

If the trillion dollar debt the government is about to incur is divided equally among 300 million Americans it will come to $3,333.33 per person. It seems to me that will drag down the economy as much or more than letting a few rogue companies go belly up.

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