Putting One Trillion Dollars Into Perspective

There was an article published today in the USA Today about how big the U.S.’s unfunded liabilities problem is. The USA Today estimates that the U.S. has $61.6 trillion or $534,000 per American household in unfunded liabilities. This means that the U.S. government has made $61.6 trillion worth of promises that it has not set aside money to pay for.

• This number increased by $5.3 trillion in the Year 2010.

One million Dollars, one million Euros, one million Yen, one million British Pounds, etc is a lot of money to me. However, when I hear about how the U.S. government owes trillions of dollars or spends trillions of dollars I tend to lose perspective about how staggering that amount of money is. I know a billion dollars is a lot more than a million dollars and a trillion dollars is a lot more than a billion dollars, but I hear about how the U.S. government spends or owes billions and trillions of dollars so often in the news that I sometimes get the impression that a trillion dollars is not as large as it actually is.

I thought it would be useful to provide a few examples which could help put into perspective how much one trillion dollars is since we hear about that number in the news a lot. Today I share these examples with you.

• If you do not live in the United States just imagine that I am talking about the local currency that you use. For instance, if you live in Europe just imagine that I am talking about one trillion Euros, which is a figure that sometimes appears in the news.

Temple University Math Professor John Allen Paulos described how much one trillion dollars is to CNN Money in a way that is fairly easy way to comprehend:

A million dollars a day for 2,000 years is only three-quarters of a trillion dollars. It's a big number no matter how you slice it

In other words, if you spent $1,000,000 a day since Christ was born you still would not have come close to spending one trillion dollars. You would still have a few hundred years of spending a million dollars a day remaining.

• $1,000,000 in some cases is the total life savings of some people. Imagine what it would be like to spend the equivalent of a person’s life savings everyday for more than 2000 years.

Paulos also described how much one trillion dollars to CNN Money in a more startlingly way.

A million seconds is about 11½ days. A billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years…People tend to lump them together, perhaps because they rhyme, but if you think of it in terms of a jail sentence, do you want to go to jail for 11½ days or 32 years or maybe 32,000 years?

Finally, here is an explanation that I devised on my own:

• My dad recently purchased a very nice King James Bible with a leather cover and large font for around $10. One trillion dollars would enable me to buy 100 billion copies of this Bible or give away more than 14 copies of this Bible to everyone (man, woman, and child) in the world (assuming the world population is 7 billion). The number of Bibles that one trillion dollars can enable me to purchase is likely several times more than the total number of Bibles ever produced, including every version, language, and dialect (an estimated 6 billion Bibles were produced through the Year 1992).

I hope these examples help to give you a better sense of how much one trillion dollars is or how much a trillion is in your own local currency...