

What does one trillion dollars look like? - gibsonf1
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

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nazgulnarsil
One of the things contributing to our continued economic illiteracy is our
insistence on stupid abstractions like this. When you distribute huge sums of
money it doesn't actually wind up being all that much in individual terms.
"hose the rich, they can afford it!" yeah, but after you hose the rich (and
they start leaving/not investing) you only have like...a grand per person. A
trillion dollars is less than 3 grand per person in the US. Say we hosed the
rich to the tune of a trillion EVERY YEAR. We still wouldnt have enough for
our socialist schemes. Meanwhile, investment plummets and the productive leave
the country...

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Rod
I wholeheartedly agree with your point. But is it a matter of economic
illiteracy? Isn't it a matter of plain innumeracy? $1 trillion = 1E12 dollars,
300 million Americans = 3E8 persons, and hence that is only approx. 3 grand
per person, like you mentioned. This is basic arithmetic. It's not even a
problem of economic illiteracy, though economic illiteracy is a serious
problem which allows demagogues to manipulate the masses easily. Cheap
sentimentalism is defeating rationality. Even if the rich were heavily taxed,
there's simply not enough money to pay for the benefits this generation of
Americans seems to feel entitled to.

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asmithmd1
I find it more helpful to divide these huge numbers by the number of US
households (aprox. 100,000,000)

Doing that we get $10,000/household instead of $3,000 for every man, woman,
child, prisoner, etc.

I think budget numbers ought to be reported this way. The recent $410 billion
spending bill would be reported as $4100/household spending bill. Suddenly
people start to think differently - Do I really want to borrow $4100 to spend
on this?

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Rod
You're quite right. My analysis was simplistic and naive.

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curtis
I think this would be more meaningful if it was preceded by a visualization of
what 300 million people looked like.

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rms
[http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~dbl/cfdsdisk/cfdsdisk/Space%20view...](http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~dbl/cfdsdisk/cfdsdisk/Space%20views%20of%20countries/USA%20from%20space%20%28DMSP,%20W%20Sullivan%20-%20Hansen%20Planetarium%20%29.jpg)

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tptacek
What does one terabyte look like? Well, imagine we printed each byte on a slip
of paper and...

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vinutheraj
IF you are going along the lines of the article, then shouldn't it be 100
bytes on each piece of paper ?!

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chadgeidel
I had always heard that 1 page (one side) of plain text was about 1KB.
Unfortunately I can't find any resources to back that up. The closest I could
find was this article which indicates 2KB per "typewritten page":
[http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci9...](http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci944596,00.html)

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sedm0784
See also the MegaPenny Project:

<http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/>

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skalpelis
I sort of half-expected a giant pile of money with the Joker sitting on top of
it, gasoline nearby.

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whajost
I'm not really sure But I would like to have that amount someday ! May be my
website <http://www.cashsolutionssite.com> might get me there someday

Thanks

Wishful Thinking

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thingsilearned
That's really not a lot of paper. We should have no problem printing that out.

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albertcardona
Banks, OTOH, would have lots of trouble storing it.

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Banzai10
It looks like a lot of stuff, but try to do a pile of overestimated assets
costing 1 trillion dollars, it wont fill your pocket, and today won't buy
anithing.

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biohacker42
Everybody who is voting this up, I dislike you personally.

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Rod
Too bad the stimulus money injection is wired to the companies' bank accounts.
Imagine a $10 billion bail out delivered in cash to the door of AIG's
headquarters, for instance. Imagine 18-wheelers carrying truckloads of $100
bills. That would be impressive indeed :-)

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Devilboy
Reportedly pallets full of cash was shipped to Iraq in cargo planes to finance
the war effort.

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Rod
And some of those pallets full of cash were reported missing. Is anyone
surprised?

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tlrobinson
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1>

Wow.

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Rod
It looks like some people did retire young, LOL. Seriously, this is more than
just _some_ pallets. This must have been one the biggest frauds ever. Unless,
of course, the whole point was simply to inject liquidity in the crippled
Iraqi economy. This would be a great story for a John Grisham book.

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thepanister
This question - for some reason, reminds me with the stimulus plan. [EDIT: I
did not really know that this is about the stimulus plan!!]

Maybe a trillion dollars look like a 20 racks of servers - but cash instead?
:)

