Today,
bonddad wrote about the prospect of a TEN TRILLION dollar debt ceiling. We all know that's a staggering sum, but how many of us really grasp the magnitude and meaning of a mind-boggling number like that?
A billion of this, a trillion of that. It's all so beyond our range of personal experience, numbers that huge just make our eyes glaze over. That's why I'm always glad to find analogies and illustrations--some kind of mental or graphic images--that put these concepts into the kind of perspective we can "get." (They're also a great tool to catch the interest of family and friends who don't pay much attention to 'dull federal budget statistics.')
I recently found some good examples on the net. Please join me for some
SHOW AND TELL...
First up: two excellent
short videos at True Majority. One uses cookies, of all things, to express the enormity of our defense spending; the other involves bee-bees, in a jaw-dropping demonstration of the size of our nuclear weapons stockpile.
National Priorities Project provides an eye-opening perspective on the cost of the war in Iraq. It does it by showing what that money could have bought, instead. For example, it indicates that the nearly $280 billion spent so far could have fully funded global anti-hunger efforts for 11 years or ensured that every child in the world was given basic immunizatiions for 93 years. (See the site for more comparisons.)
Want to better understand just how enormous that 10 trillion dollar debt ceiling would be? This calculation from NASA helps put it into perspective. Using a variation on the theme 'time is money,' if one second represents one dollar, it would take more than 315 CENTURIES to equal a trillion dollars. And that's just ONE trillion dollars.
That blows me away.
If you have any you would like to share, please do!