What does One Trillion Dollars Look Like?

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html ^ | 7/31/11 | self

[KarlInOhio]

strangely enough, $1 trillion over 10 years looks amazingly like $100 billion in a single year

By Washington accounting $1 trillion of cuts over 10 years looks like a couple billion the first year or two and then disappears entirely. $1 trillion in spending over 10 years looks like $100 billion the first year, $180 billion the second, a quarter trillion the third, and so on.

[UCANSEE2]

It would take 10 Milky Way Galaxies to add up to a trillion stars.

[Iron Munro]

The U.S. National Debt

As of June 29, 2011, the total U.S. national debt outstanding has reached $14.46 trillion dollars.

Two years in March, 2009 the U.S. national debt hit $11 trillion dollars.

Below is an image showing what the 2009 U.S. national debt of $11 trillion dollars looks like in $100 dollar bills.

Ten pallets loaded with $100 dollar bills contain $1 billion dollars.

Each layer of pallets in the following image contains 5,000 pallets (50 wide by 100 deep).
Each layer of 5,000 pallets of $100 dollar bills equals $500 billon dollars.
Two layers of pallets contain 10,000 pallets holding a total of $1 trillion dollars.

As of June 29, 2011, the total U.S. national debt outstanding has reached $14.46 trillion dollars.
That represents about 98.6% of calendar year 2010's annual gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.66 trillion dollars.

To visualize that amount, imagine 7 more layers, each with 5,000 pallets, sitting on top of the pile in the image below.

Image showing what $11 trillion dollars in $100 dollar bills looks like.

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

Sorry but your graphic is off a bit. You say a pallet load of green is one million. I counted the rows and columns in the "trillion" dollar stack and came up with fifty across by one hundred front to back, stacked two pallets deep, or 10,000. At one million per pallet that's $10,000,000,000 (ten billion) or off by a factor of 100x. The pallet load of cash is actually $100,000,000.

Currency paper is about 0.006" thick, A stack of 10,000 one hundred dollar bills would be about sixty inches tall. Break that down into six ten inch stacks and a million dollars worth of one hundred dollar bills would fit in a grocery bag, no fork truck required.

Since the advent of calculators, people have lost the ability to make rational estimates as to magnitude of expected numerical answers.

Regards,
GtG

[deport]

I only posted the graphics from the linked article from which this thread orginated. If it is in error then the linked article is in error. Glad you took the time to count all that stuff.

[deport]

Disregard my other post to you. You are correct as I copied the number down incorrectly. I wasn’t paying attention. My bad.

[BobL]

“I bet you meant a TRILLION dollars, right?”

Yes sir!! Daaaaaaaaa!!! I should review what I post, especially when it involves numbers.

Thanks for the correction.

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

Glad you took the time to count all that stuff.

It's my hobby, I torture numbers until they talk to me...

I once added up the tax withheld on my pay stubs and compared it to the W2 statement. I found a difference (apparently a software glitch) between what should have been identical numbers. I then reviewed the previous five years and found the same error except the magnitude was smaller at the start and increased slightly every year. I decided to let things lay and not poke around further as the W2s were actually over stating the tax withheld.

Sometimes it best not to kick that sleeping dog to find out if it bites...

Regards,
GtG

PS It helps that I've seen a million in cash in Vegas at Binion's Horseshoe and I knew it wasn't a pallet load! Actually it was 100 $10,000 bills which are no longer in circulation. You could put the entire stash in a fat wallet but you'd have trouble getting change.