WHEN I was a kid growing up in Illinois, our Senator at the time, Everett Dirksen was famously quoted as saying about government spending, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
Nowadays of course the word “billion” has been replaced in the public lexicon with the word “trillion,” and this word is batted about so casually and frequently that it has become, in another word of our time, “normalized,” which is to say trivialized (in the McLuhan sense of things, where the “social” medium becomes the message, not the message itself…).
And even as the age old pulsating triangle involving the public, politicians, and “the news” simmers and occasionally boils over on our “social” media with regard to this trivializing, it might behoove us to pause for a moment to try and grasp what the concept of a “trillion” might actually look like in the real world where currency, let alone “value,” is increasingly slipping into the elastic world of the digital all.
THE tech bro’s may scoff and look down their noses these days at a million dollars, but to most of us the concept of a million of anything still means something.
Let’s think of an image of a million dollar bills stacked on high, one at a time, to try and visualize what it might look like to human eye.
Our stack of one million greenbacks would reach a height of approximately 360 feet – twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, or about a quarter of the height of The Empire State Building. A fair amount more than one could ever fold into a wallet – assuming the wallet was made of leather, not digits...
NOW, how about a billion of those same one-dollar bills?
To give a sense of the exponential difference between a million and a billion – or the difference between a millionaire and a tech bro – our stack would now stretch more than 100 times the height of the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai that Tom Cruise had the gut wrenching courage to hang from in the last Mission Impossible movie!
Or twelve times higher than Mount Everest!
Um, yeah, those tech bro’s are rich…
BUT lastly, let’s try and grasp the concept that we so casually let bounce from a pundit’s lips to a politician’s to a reporter of “the news” on any of the screens we glue ourselves to until our eyes turn as dry as the terrain surrounding the Burj.
Our stack of dollar bills, numbering “just” one trillion would now not fit on our planet, Mother Earth.
No, our stack would stretch 70,000 miles into outer space!
One quarter of the distance to the
NOW multiply that distance by 2.4 – or the amount of those dollars that would be added to the US deficit by our current leader’s “Big Beautiful Tax & Spending Bill” -- and you might, just might, be able to hold in your brain for even a fleeting second that a post on your “social media” would take to travel around Mother Earth at the speed of light, what the size of “a trillion” of something, anything, let alone US dollars, might look like.
Imagine those greenbacks stretching from your desk or couch halfway to the moon!
Makes one think we might get to “colonizing” the moon during this administration’s four years after all – that is, if you consider our national debt being the astronaut of our time.