Since we've been talking about trillion dollar deficits, probably more than a trillion in the current fiscal year, let's see if we can picture what a trillion dollars looks like.
If you were the most generous employer in the world, paying your factory workers $1,000 per hour, and if you had 1,000 workers, your payroll would be a million dollars an hour. Each worker would have a check for $80,000 every two weeks, before taxes, of course.
At that rate, you'd be paying $40 million for a 40 hour week, and, assuming your factory was in operation for 52 weeks of the year, your yearly cost would be $2,080,000,000 per year.
At that rate, you could operate your thousand dollar an hour factory for nearly 500 years before spending your first trillion dollars.
Seen another way, a $100 bill weighs in at a scant one gram when it is newly minted.
Of course, as it ages, it loses some of the paper, and most likely gains a few grains of cocaine, so it still weighs around a gram.
A thousand grams is a kilogram, and a thousand kilograms is a ton, so a million hundreds would weigh a metric ton.
A billion hundreds would weigh a thousand tons, then, and ten billion would weigh ten thousand tons.
A trillion dollars in hundreds would weigh in at ten thousand metric tons. It would take a thousand ten ton trucks to haul it all.
That's the kind of deficits the feds are talking about having this year.
Scary, ain't it?
If you were the most generous employer in the world, paying your factory workers $1,000 per hour, and if you had 1,000 workers, your payroll would be a million dollars an hour. Each worker would have a check for $80,000 every two weeks, before taxes, of course.
At that rate, you'd be paying $40 million for a 40 hour week, and, assuming your factory was in operation for 52 weeks of the year, your yearly cost would be $2,080,000,000 per year.
At that rate, you could operate your thousand dollar an hour factory for nearly 500 years before spending your first trillion dollars.
Seen another way, a $100 bill weighs in at a scant one gram when it is newly minted.
Of course, as it ages, it loses some of the paper, and most likely gains a few grains of cocaine, so it still weighs around a gram.
A thousand grams is a kilogram, and a thousand kilograms is a ton, so a million hundreds would weigh a metric ton.
A billion hundreds would weigh a thousand tons, then, and ten billion would weigh ten thousand tons.
A trillion dollars in hundreds would weigh in at ten thousand metric tons. It would take a thousand ten ton trucks to haul it all.
That's the kind of deficits the feds are talking about having this year.
Scary, ain't it?
