To be perfectly honest, I have no concept of a trillion anything. It's just too big.
We put counters up on KerryVision yesterday to remind us all of the cost of Bush's war in blood and treasure. It wasn't easy to look at the numbers or the faces of the service members who lost their lives as we searched through websites for the counters, but I can at least relate to the statistics. Three thousand, seven hundred ninety five is a lot of people, God rest them, it's 3,795 too many. But the number itself isn't beyond anyone's capacity to fathom.
What I couldn't grasp, in terms of volume, is the half a trillion dollars we've already spent on Mr. Bush's war. For someone like me, who is mathematically challenged, it took a lot of research to try to wrap my head around the concept of a trillion. I'm still not sure I can grasp the enormity of a trillion anything, but at least I have an idea.
It's way too much.
How much bigger than a billion is a trillion? One thousand times. Three zeros bigger. It's a number so big, it needs to be seen in a human context before we can really grasp its size. So, we might say: It's the year 0, the beginning of the first millennium, and you have a trillion dollars to spend, at the rate of a million dollars a day. At just before three years, you've reached a billion. You keep spending, and now you are in the year 2001. You still have 737 years to go, spending a million every day, before you reach the end of your trillion dollar pile.
I cut the grass today in my average sized yard and wondered how long it would take, mowing an average of 30 times a year, to cut a trillion blades of grass. My best estimate was 66 years. No matter what method I used, I'll be dead long before I ever reach a trillion blades of grass.
In it's 60 years of operation, McDonalds has sold over 100 billion burgers. Currently, they average about a billion a year. At that rate, McDonalds will sell a trillion burgers in a thousand years.
A galaxy is pretty big. The number of stars in our galaxy, as Carl Sagan (and Johnny Carson) might have said, is "billions and billions". Of course, no one knows the exact number of stars in our galaxy, but one estimate is 400 billion. That's less than the dollar cost of the Iraq war to date.
Here's what a trillion pennies looks like.
David Leonhardt provides some perspective in his January, 2007 NYT article, "What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy".
How much will the war in Iraq end up costing American taxpayers? Difficult to say. Some estimates are as high as two trillion dollars. That's two times something I can't imagine once.
When my daughter was little, she asked a lot of questions, like all kids do. Questions like "Mommy, why is the sky blue?", or "Why are there 64 crayons in a box?" or "Why do most grandmas have blond hair?" Good thing she never asked me what a trillion is, because I didn't know. Still don't. But there's an easy answer. If your kids or grandkids ever ask you what a trillion is, you can tell them,
"It's what you paid for Bush's war."
Video Credit: ccvtee
Comments (2)
Posted by Violet | September 23, 2007 8:04 AM
Interesting that you should write about this today. Georgia10 (who I met at YearlyKos along with her mother) wrote about the economics of the Iraq War as well yesterday. She was commenting on Bush's joke about his grade in economics and the Washington Post article that came out about the cost of the war.
From Georgia10:
Posted by Otter | September 23, 2007 12:11 PM
It still chaps my asterisk that the bogus Boehner bullspit Violet & Georgia10 mentioned didn't get dogpiled on by the Dems the moment he spewed it out on the Wolf Blitzer show. The media should've been all over it like green on grass, the way they were with JK's infamous dropped pronoun. But instead they just went on mewling and puking and acting like little Bushi'ite lapdogs, same as ever. Gee, go figure, huh?
JK was the first and for quite a while the only Dem pol to come right out in public and bust Boehner on his crass and callous calculation of lives lost in Iraq being a "small price to pay" for pursuing Shrub's petty pipe dreams of empire. There's a good blog entry about it on JK's site that coincidentally also tries to put the huge & growing cost of the neokonzertruppen's failed Iraq adventure into terms everyday humans can relate to:
That was 10 whole days ago, though. And as this KV vblog entry notes, in just that short a time the terrible cost of the Reptards' quest for quagmire in Iraq has gone up by another 4 billion bucks and another 18 American flags folded into tight little triangles.
hate to break the bad news to all the Bushbabies and five-star phonies and self-serving so-called journalists out there, but those equations are anything but balanced, and those prices are anything but small.
We need to flunk all these fools and flunkies, stat. Because there's just no way to make *that* kind of misshapen math add up to anything but high crimes and misdemeanors in my workbook, y'all...