Don't Tell Obama about Quadrillion

I'm terrible with numbers. All my life, I've been strong with words, weak with numbers. For this reason, when my husband and I played darts, I'd be figuring out how much was left on my score, while others would be yelling out the number. I'd just shake my head and keep figuring. If I didn't do it for myself, how would I know it was right? And how would I learn?

Numbers tend to just have symbolic meaning to me. It's like the number 202 on an apartment. The number is a designation, but it doesn't mean amount of (as in two hundred and two apartments). So I find 300,000 to be quite similar to 3,000. To really know the difference, I have to think about it.

The budget that just passed Congress is $3 trillion. Just how much is one trillion?

According to one source, if you spent one million dollars EVERY DAY from year 1 (after Christ's time) to now, you would still not have spent one trillion dollars. It comes to about $734 billion.

Here's another way to look at it. One trillion seconds makes 31,546 years! But I can't really fathom that. A year of seconds becomes more than I can fathom.

This was the best way for me. If you stack up $1,000 bills, one million dollars makes about a four-inch stack. (I confirmed this with my husband who used to deal with stacks of bills.) Now to make one trillion dollars from a stack of $1,000 bills, you need to stack them up to (and over) 63 miles!

The Sandias are approximately one mile high from the valley floor. Sixty-three Sandias stacked up would be level with our stack of $1,000 bills that makes ONE trillion dollars. Triple that, and you've got three trillion.

WHY, WHY, WHY???