Meanwhile, the government and the media have been throwing around numbers in the trillions. Did you notice that just a few months ago, $300 billion was a huge number? But after hearing $300 billion for a few weeks, $700 billion didn’t faze us anymore. Then it tripped into trillion. WOW. That was HUGE, but now I’m hearing $1.7 trillion and $3 trillion and this morning I heard $20 trillion! As I was driving around, it dawned on me that I had absolutely no perspective of what “a trillion” was – and here someone was quoting 20 of them!
- If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills!
- One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.
The human brain has a hard time comprehending this. It’s just too big, overwhelming and paralyzing.