Last month the U.S. federal deficit topped $1,000,000,000,000—that’s $1 trillion—for the first time in history. It could actually reach $2,000,000,000,000 by this fall.Recently I was shopping for books for my kids at Goodwill (one of my favorite places to pick them up) and found a book by David M. Schwartz called How Much Is A Million? Both of my boys are in that basic math phase where they figuring out the comparative value of different numbers, so I picked it up for them.
It’s a delightful little book that uses visual pictures to describe “how much is” a million, a billion, and a trillion. I thought I would share a paraphrase of one of the descriptions of how much a trillion was:
If I went to a store and purchased an item worth exactly $1,
and then paid for it with a $1 trillion bill,
and the cashier gave me change in $1 bills,
it would take him almost 200,000 years to count it out!
Good stuff Steph-I also read the other day that we are up to $32,000.00 of debt for every man, woman, and child in America.
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