Personal Injury Law

Nice to Meet You, One Trillion Dollars

By Jim Reed

I’d like to introduce you to someone we’ve all been hearing about lately - and that we are all going to get to know in some form or other (as a boon or a debt): a TRILLION dollars.

It’s the scale of money, big, big money that is being distributed in the stimulus and bailout packages by the U.S. government to jump-start our flagging economy.

Some things and concepts are so colossal, it’s difficult to wrap your mind around them. Like the distance to the sun, or the speed of light.

To help you wrap your mind around the size of the stimulus and bailout programs, I found the following descriptions of a trillion bucks:

• First of all, remember that a trillion dollars is a million, million dollars. Written out, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000. (Probably easier to stick to using just “trillion”.)

• A trillion dollars has a bit of a weight problem. In one dollar bills, it would weigh about 1.1 million tons. If you were using 100 dollar bills it would weigh about 11 thousands tons.

• A trillion dollars is one tall drink of water. 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 1 trillion.

• A trillion dollars requires quite a commitment. You could earn a dollar a second for 32,000 years and still not quite earn a trillion.

• At Pagetutor.com, you can see a really fun visualization of a trillion dollars, created with Google Sketchup, a 3-D modeling program.

Thanks for reading,

Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

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Full post as published by New York Injury Law Blog on March 31, 2009 (boomark / email).