I’ve always been a believer in the theory of large numbers. That is to say that a big number is always better than a small number. But there’s a limit to everything.
In the last few days I’ve heard the number trillion used more than I can ever recall. In the instances where I can recall hearing trillion used it was always in a statement like, “there must be a trillion grains of sand on the beach”, or “I’ve tried to balance my check book a trillion times, and it’s always off”. I don’t recollect people using the designation trillion when talking about something specific as in, “those crazy idiots in congress are going to cost us a trillion dollars with this bailout”.
But now that I think about it, the number trillion has been used increasingly for some time to describe stuff. For example:
1. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the US is about $13 trillion
2. The total face amount of home mortgages in the US is $12 trillion, and
3. The total US public debt is slight less than $10 trillion as of noon today
You see what I mean. It’s interesting that all of the examples I could think of had to do with $$$; which set me to thinking……exactly how much is a trillion dollars, anyways? How can I think of it or relate it to something that I can relate to? How can congress vote on something unless that something has some finite meaning to them in the world we live in?
Call me a small thinker if you will, but I’ve tried to think of the largest number that I can personally relate to and it’s not really a very big number. I got it on 100’s. I can line up a hundred rocks and see them and count them, or I can count my fingers and toes ten times. A thousand is harder, but I know I can get there as well. I know it’s about 1800 miles from Dallas to New York and it takes about three and a half hours to get there by air unless there’s a thunderstorm within 100 miles of DFW airport. See, I used thousand and hundred in the same specific instance that I understand. One hundred thousand (100,000) is harder but I know that the Rose Bowl holds 100,000 football fans at certain times of the year. I’ve never counted them, but I think I could if I had too. Plus I’ve seen them on TV on New Years Day.
I start having problems at a million. I know that some people say they make a million $$$, but I’ve never really believed them, and they’ve never proved it to my satisfaction. Yeah, yeah, I know that they have three cars, a boat, an eight thousand sq. ft. house, and three kids in private school, but that doesn’t really prove that they have a million bucks. After all, how big a space would you need to keep a million $$$? A closet, a living room, a garage? See what I mean. It’s really hard to think about even just one million of anything. But for sake of discussion, I’ll suspend my disbelief and concede that a million is real, something that I can possibly envision. But I still don’t think that anyone in my neighborhood really makes that much.
A billion, well that’s actually easier. Just think of a billion Chinese. Everyone knows there are that many because you see them wherever you go, and there’s probably a million Chinese restaurants in San Francisco alone. Not to mention the Indians. Everyone says there’s at least a billion of them, and I believe it because every time I call anyone to ask a question about anything, an Indian person answers. That’s not a coincidence.
A trillion….I just can’t get there. I’m gonna say it now so that you know where I’m coming from. There’s no such thing as a trillion, it doesn’t really exist, and you can’t prove that it does, I don’t care what any one says. To be safe, I called my friend Walter, who’s a really big cheese accounting guy for the government to ask him about it and he tried to explain. He said, “it’s really pretty simple, a trillion is nothing more than a thousand billions”. I admitted that it doesn’t really sound like so much if you say it that way, but if you said for instance that a trillion is one billion thousands, I’d start to have problems again. Walter went on, “think of it this way. The trillion dollar bailout out that congress announced and then voted down is nothing more than $3,300 for every one of the three hundredmillion men, women and children in America or $7,800 for every household in the country.” I told you that Walter was smart. He made a trillion seem real by dividing it up into smaller bits. I wanted to paint him in the corner though so I said, “ok, Mr. Smarty Pants. You can throw those numbers around all you want to, but tell me this. If I had a million dollars (hah) and invested it at 10%, how long would it be before I had a trillion dollars?” I was pretty sure this would stump even Walter. The answer he quickly gave me, and this is really gonna surprise you was……144 years and 8 months. Whoa, hold on there. That means if you had a great, great, great grand daddy that invested $1 million in 1863 (not that long ago in the grand scheme of things), and somehow avoided paying taxes, you would have exactly one trillion dollars today. You could finance the bail out.
OK. I got the math, but I’m sticking to my initial position. A trillion is too big to imagine or be real, so I’m gonna disregard anything that uses that word. It will make life simpler, and I’m gonna ask my congressman to vote for the deal (bailout that is)….if I can figure out who he is.
