They are! Do you know, really and without any kind of visual references, what trillions means? We can, usually with ease, imagine what a thousand is. It's ten one-hundred-dollar bills. One hundred thousand. It is a big number, but almost everyone can imagine it. We've been so completely exposed to a million that we can see it, even use it without really knowing what it is. A billion is almost as common. A trillion? Apparently a trillion is as common in political speech as a hundred is in daily speech.
Let's look at it sideways ... A hundred thousand, easy
A thousand thousand? Oh ... that's a Million.
A hundred million ... a hundred thousand thousand.
Billion? A thousand million! Wow, Can you really wrap your mind around a thousand million? A hundred thousand million is one hundred billion.
Holy crap. One hundred thousand million is a hundred billion.
A thousand billion ...
A thousand billion dollars is one trillion dollars. A thousand thousand million dollars. Cripes! A thousand thousand million dollars! According to some sources, the actual national debt is closer to one hundred-six trillion dollars (give or take twenty trillion, depending on the data used).
Sideways?
One hundred-six thousand billion dollars? A hundred-six thousand thousand million dollars?
Really?
Really?!?!
If the state of California is in debt for something like twenty-six billion dollars, and it is the most ... broke? The most broke state in the country, and if every state in this country was just as broke, the debt would be on the order of one trillion three hundred billion dollars.
The bailouts and the stimulus package are on the order of one trillion five hundred billion dollars.
I know, the numbers don't necessarily show all of the other variables, but it puts the whole thing in a strange perspective, doesn't it?
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