A Stack of 1 Trillion Pennies: 5 Ways to Visualize Our $13 Trillion National Debt

Investing Answers ^ | 6/30/10 | Meredith Margrave

[Libloather]

A Stack of 1 Trillion Pennies: 5 Ways to Visualize Our $13 Trillion National Debt
By Meredith Margrave
Wednesday, June 30, 2010

$13 trillion. That's roughly the current size of the U.S. national debt. And it continues to grow every second.

**SNIP**

4) The 50 Richest People in the Room
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the entire Walton family -- these are just a few of the names that top Forbes' annual report on the richest people in the world. Yet none of them will ever be worth a trillion dollars. In fact, if you put the 50 richest billionaires in a room, their combined net worth would barely pass $1 trillion.

5) Not Even the Biggest Blue-Chips
Let's go back to how much purchasing power $1 trillion will give you. For that amount of money, you could buy every share of ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) -- and still have more than $700 billion to spend buying up every share of…

•Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) -- $233.10 billion
•Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) -- $204.29 billion
•Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) -- $197.89 billion
•Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) -- $181.40 billion

Now multiply by 13. Can you wrap your brain around that?

[word_warrior_bob]

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

The best illustration I’ve ever seen of what a Trillion dollars is and looks like.

Go there, you’ll be shocked.

[Deo volente]

Every single minute, $3.2 million is added to the debt.
With each passing day, we owe $4.6 BILLION more.

http://zfacts.com/p/461.html

[Newtoidaho]

That is a great illustration but appears to be somewhat flawed; when they show the $100,000,000 on the first pallet, that is actually $1 billion. So when they show the 10 pallets and say that is $1 billion, that is actually $10 billion.
So the last picture of the seemingly endless rows of double-stacked pallets, that is about 10 times too large, Still huge but that would be closer to representing the current #14 trillion debt, rather than $1 trillion.

[freejohn]

Check out the "MegaPenny Project" HERE

[Arthur McGowan]

That’s from Dorothy Parker.

What could be more boring than yet another news “story” about stacking dollar bills up to the Moon, or circling the Earth, etc., etc.

[skinkinthegrass]

thanks, for the information / thread / post.

[Libloather]

With each passing day, we owe $4.6 BILLION more.

Who is 'we'? Pelosi & Reid have their exempted Obamacare secured - forever. Pretty good "benefits" - eh?

[Libloather]

thanks, for the information

I'd be lyin' otherwise.

[word_warrior_bob]

I think you’re mistaken and the illustration is correct. Perhaps you’re confused by the scale? The packets of 100 dollar bills themselves seem a bit big. The first pallet you mention as being a billion is one hundred million, it takes ten of those pallets to get a billion.

Look at it again.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

[Liz]

Obama’s Deficit Avalanche isn’t Bush’s Fault / scottuystarnes.com / 2/9/2010
SOURCE http://scottystarnes.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/obama-deficit.jpg?w=400&h=308

Washington Times reports: Even more staggering than the mountains of snow in the capital are the deficits the Obama administration plans for the next decade. Huge spending increases will add about $12 trillion to the national debt for budget years 2009 to 2020.

The scariest part is that these deficits are based on unrealistic budgeting assumptions; the real fiscal outlook is much bleaker. In the proposed 2011 budget, the White House defensively attacks the “irresponsibility of past” deficits.

For example, the 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion is blamed on the George W. Bush administration as if President Obama’s $862 billion stimulus package and more than $400 billion supplemental spending bill had nothing to do with it. Mr. Obama’s planned 2010 budget deficit rises to an even higher record level of $1.6 trillion.

By comparison, all of Mr. Bush’s deficits from 2002 to 2008 – the seven years during which his team had the most control over the budget – produced a combined deficit of $2.1 trillion.

Obama has spent more in 2 years than Bush did in 7 years. Obama’s BIOB (Blame it on Bush) defense just won’t work anymore.

[Liz]

Behind The Real Size of Obama's Wall Street Bailout (more like $14 trillion)
Mother Jones | Dec. 21, 2009 / FR Posted January 04, 2010 by E. Pluribus Unum

A guide to the abbreviations, acronyms, and obscure programs that make up the $14 trillion federal bailout of Wall Street.

The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets. To get a sense of the size of the real $14 trillion bailout, see our chart here. Below, a guide to the pieces of the puzzle:

Treasury Department bailout programs (controlled by Rahm Emanuel)

Money Market Mutual Fund: In September 2008, the Treasury announced that it would insure the holdings of publicly offered money market mutual funds. According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), these guarantees could have potentially cost the federal government more than $3 trillion [PDF].

Public-Private Investment Fund: This joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program bought toxic assets from banks and brokerages—as much as $5 billion of assets per firm. According to SIGTARP, the government's potential exposure from the PPIF is between $500 million and $1 trillion [PDF].

TARP: As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Treasury has made loans to or investments more than 750 banks and financial institutions. $650 billion has been paid out (not including HAMP; see below). As of December 21, 2009, $117.5 billion of that has been repaid. Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) stock purchase: The Treasury has bought $200 million in preferred stock from Fannie Mae and another $200 million from Freddie Mac [PDF] to show that they "will remain viable entities critical to the functioning of the housing and mortgage markets." GSE mortgage-backed securities purchase: Under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Treasury may buy mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to SIGTARP, these purchases could cost as much as $314 billion [PDF].

--SNIP--- long read

Federal Reserve bailout programs

Commercial Paper Funding Facility: With the support from the Treasury, the Fed established the CPFF in October 2008 to increase the availability of short-term debt (commercial paper) funding. Up to $1.8 trillion [PDF] was earmarked for the program.

Mortgage-backed securities purchase: In 2009, the Fed earmarked up to $1.25 trillion to buy investments based on home loans.

Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility: TALF provides financing to investors who are buying asset-backed securities. In February 2009, the Fed and Treasury announced an expansion of the program to generate up to $1 trillion in new lending.

Foreign Central Bank Currency Liquidity Swaps: The Fed has provided $755 billion [PDF] for currency liquidity swaps with foreign central banks.

--SNIP--- long read

[NCLaw441]

There’s a film?

[Ditter]

On Fox this morning there was a democrap slub shouting down the Fox anchor that the GWB recession was the complete cause for the recession. He said GWB created NO jobs in his 8 years in the WH NONE ZERO NADA and nobama has created a million jobs. All he could do was run down GWB and billionaires for causing the problem. The Fox anchor was polite to him but you could hear the tension in her voice.

[alexandria]

My FAVORITE video for visualization of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at3MNu8BRwQ

[hiredhand]

You KNOW it!

[hiredhand]

Proverbs 22:7 reads - "The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower is servant to the lender."

We've always had taxes. Taxes aren't the problems. The problem is exactly what that snippet above says. In layman's terms, it translates to an ocean of brainless people who just had to have their STUFF....mountains of it! They had to have new houses on CREDIT, new cars on CREDIT, college degrees on CREDIT....EVERTHING ON CREDIT! Then the government legislated it and enforced it, so the banks pushed it, the stock market securitized it, traded it, and *BINGO*!!! Subprime exploded all over the place! It was a logical and predictable digression.

But it didn't just happen. Stupid people enabled it. More specifically, stupid, greedy people. Even as it all unfolded in front of our very eyes, they chose "Hope and Change" and ruination over the hard choices that would have brought the Republic back from the brink. People made a CHOICE. It was conscious, willful, and deliberate.

There is simply no way to tell the people of America that they're now so screwed to a depth which can't be adequately expressed by words. Even if it could be expressed, most don't have the capacity to believe it, much less comprehend it. I personally stopped trying to warn them months ago. It's a waste of energy at this point and my efforts are better spent with those who can actually help me, and whom I can help in turn in the days to come.

You can blame those evil land barons if you'd like. But to get any significant numbers to believe it you'll need factual information backing it up.

[dps.inspect]

Not quite sure what your getting at... my point was simply that the government has become equivolent to land barrons... but, rant on bro, rant on...