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Saturday, March 07, 2009

What does a trillion dollars look like?

Since it is extremely difficult for most people to grasp enormous dollar amounts that government spends, e.g. $1 Trillion, we often have to resort to gimics, such as "spending $1 million every day since Jesus was born", which still is hard to comprehend.

Here is a great graphical representation of a trillion dollars, in $100 bills.  A $10,000 packet of freshly printed $100 bills is quite small, and even $1 million doesn't take up much space - though my suprise may be due to the fact that I have only seen that amount of money in movies, in which the briefcase to pay the mafia is always full of cash.  But once you get to $1 trillion, it looks much more like a giant warehouse full of stacks and stacks of money.

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