Trillions? Get ready for quadrillion

Debt clock in NYC modified to handle incomprehensible growth

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Posted: February 13, 2009
11:35 pm Eastern


By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2009 WorldNetDaily


NEW YORK – The Obama administration economic stimulus package is going to force the Treasury to borrow approximately $2.5 trillion in 2009 and another $4 trillion in 2010, with the result of increasing the current $10 trillion national debt by 65 percent in just two years.

If the Obama administration increases the national debt by 65 percent every two years, the debt will be $16.5 trillion in 2010 and $27.225 trillion by 2012, the year of the next presidential election.

To answer the question of how big a problem borrowing $6.5 trillion will be over the next two years, we decided to examine just how large 1 trillion actually is.

One trillion is the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes, as in: 1,000,000,000,000.

If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, 365 days a year, it would take you until October 2737 to lose $1 trillion.

If you spent $1 million a day, every day since Jesus was born, you would still be only slightly more that three-quarters of the way to spending $1 trillion.

One trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans comes out to $3,333 per person.

One trillion one-dollar bills stacked one on top of the other would reach nearly 68,000 miles into the sky, about a third of the way from the Earth to the moon.

Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to contain about 200 billion stars. So, if each star cost one dollar, one trillion dollars would buy five Milky Way galaxies full of stars.

One trillion seconds of ordinary clock time equals 31,546 years. So, spending money at the rate of one dollar every second, or $86,400 every day, would still take nearly 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion.

If someone were to build city blocks that contained 10 homes valued at $100,000 per home, you would end up with ten houses to a block, ten blocks to a mile and a hundred blocks per square mile. It would take 10,000 square miles to reach $1 trillion in value. This would be more than the size of six U.S. states: Vermont, 9,615 square miles; New Hampshire, 9,351 square miles; New Jersey, 8,722 square miles; Connecticut, 5,544 square miles; Delaware, 1,954 square miles; and Rhode Island, 1,545 square miles.

Craig Smith, founder and CEO of Swiss America, estimates it would take approximately four generations of Americans to pay off the interest of the U.S. Treasury bonds sold as debt to create the $1 trillion stimulus package, factoring in a 3 percent growth rate in the economy throughout that time.

The U.S. national debt now exceeds $10 trillion according to the according to the U.S. National Debt Clock, at Times Square in New York City.

With the estimated population of the United States at 305,556,415 people, each citizen's share of the national debt is $34,769.40.

In September 2008, the digital display on the Times Square National Debt Clock was modified to eliminate the dollar sign, so the national debt in tens of trillions of dollars could be displayed.

The clock, created in 1989 by Manhattan real estate developer Seymour Durst, is now being redesigned so it can display the national debt in numbers measured in the hundreds of millions, with a dollar sign that could be eliminated should the national debt ever reach $1 quadrillion.

The new clock should be ready to install early this year.

The Bush administration added more than $4 trillion to the national debt, increasing it more than 70 percent from the time George W. Bush took office Jan. 20, 2001.

Yet trillions may no longer be enough to measure important financial statistics on a global basis.

The Bank of International Settlements now estimates that derivatives, the complex bets financial institutions and sophisticated investors make with one another on everything from commodities options to credit swaps, now top $650 trillion worldwide – that’s $ 0.65 quadrillion.

A quadrillion, a trillion multiplied by 1,000, is a 1 followed by 15 zeroes, as in: 1,000,000,000,000,000. <

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