o Take-Home: $1 trillion is an inconceivably large amount of money, matched only by the government’s incompetence in spending it. o Key Data: If you worked 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 50 years, and paid yourself $1 billion a year off the top, you’d have to spend $9.5 million an hour to dispose of $1 trillion. (Source: my calculator.)
In college, my classmates and I wrestled with this riddle: Somebody gives you one million dollars, but you have to spend it within 24 hours-with nothing to show for it. You can’t give away or lose any of it.
No one solved it, but we kept trying, partly because we wanted to be prepared in case someone made the offer-just as we had our three wishes ready in case we encountered a genie.
One million dollars was a lot of money back then. Still is. But in the abstract it has dwindled as we’ve had our fiscal sensibilities dulled by references to billions.
And with Congress talking about and spending trillions, the billion-dollar figure is becoming as lackluster as the measly million. But it’s still hard to conceive of a billion of anything. And if you think that’s hard, try the concept of a trillion!
First, compare a single dollar to $1 million. Picture that one-dollar bill. Now, visualize a million of them. Mentally lay them all out end-to-end and side-to-side to create a “carpet” that will cover the playing area of roughly two football fields.
Now, we have the same relationship between $1 million and $1 trillion that we had between one dollar and $1 million. So, where you pictured the one-dollar bill on one hand and two carpeted football fields on the other, you can now picture the two football fields on one hand and two million football fields on the other. There’s your trillion dollars.
Can’t quite get your mind around the image of two million football fields? Try this:
Somebody hires you to spend a trillion dollars. You agree to a 40-hour week, two-week annual vacation, for 50 years. You can take your salary out of the trillion-say, $1 million a year. On second thought, you need to figure the tax bite and inflation. Make it $1 billion a year.
That leaves only $950 billion to spend. At 40 hours per week, times 50 weeks per year, times 50 years, you’ll have 100,000 hours in which to spend the money. That’s $9.5 million per hour, every hour, for 50 years. With no time for coffee breaks or pit stops.
And that’s just one trillion. The government is throwing around multiple trillions.
Suppose just one of those trillions were targeted to two million small businesses, giving each one $500,000. That money would go straight into the economy to buy equipment and other supplies, and to create jobs-probably at least two million new jobs, likely far more. And the ripple effect would be tremendous, truly stimulating the economy and even throwing more revenue back into the government coffers.
Or, suppose we “spend” that trillion on a total tax holiday. Talk about economic stimulus!
But instead, no one knows where the government-spent trillions go. Makes me wonder whether one of my old college classmates figured out how to spend money without having to show anything for it. If so, they must be working for the government.
Shannon Roe is a freelance writer in Bay City, Michigan.
