One one-thousand…two one-thousand…3.8 trillion one-thousand
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President Barack Obama has unveiled his new budget for fiscal year 2011 at $3.8 trillion dollars. Staggeringly huge. Brobdingnagianly big. Almost inconceivable. Just how much is a trillion dollars? Here are some comparisons.
The brain consists of about a hundred billion neurons, which is about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. A hundred billion is 1011, or a 1 following by 11 zeros: 100,000,000,000. That’s about what Obama plans to spend on Veterans Affairs ($57 billion) and Homeland Security ($43 billion) combined. It’s a huge number. It is literally an astronomical number. But that’s nothing. A trillion is a thousand billion. How much is a trillion?
Start counting seconds as “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…” and when you get to 86,400 that’s the number of seconds in a day. When you reach 31,546,000 that’s the number of seconds in a year. When you get to 315,460,000 you will have been counting for ten years, but you are still not even close. Add another 0 to get to 100 billion, and another 0 still to get to 1,000 billion, and you will have finally reached one trillion seconds. If you make it that long you will have been counting for about 30,000 years. Now, do that 3.8 times and you will have counted out the number of dollars that the Federal government plans to spend in just one year.
To count in seconds the number of dollars in the 2011 Federal budget, you will have to count “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…” for 114,000 years, which if you were counting backward in time would thrust you back to the time when humans first migrated out of Africa and began to spread across the globe, still living as hunter-gatherers with fairly crude stone tools, competing with Neanderthals and other hominids for survival, and just beginning to show signs of symbolic communication.
If ever there was a symbol to communicate that has no corresponding link to a tangible asset in the real world (such as gold or other precious metals), it is money. That’s why it is called “fiat money.” The government just declares money to be legal tender, based on the good faith of the federal government itself.
If that doesn’t jolt us all back in our chairs, consider the fact that at this rate of spending, in ten years the country will be $8.5 trillion in debt more than it already is, which amounts to $34,018 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
All this almost makes me hope that the 2012 doomsday predictions come true.
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The next year’s projected budget is admittedly huge, and it’s an indicator of our need for change, and what gets changed will be at the heart of many debates both sensible and nonsensical, but …
The figure of 3.8 trillion dollars shouldn’t be set out apart from the expected revenue in that same year, lessening the costs in that budget (the deficit) to something closer to a trillion dollars. That’s expected/projected to go down in years out. That’s still a mind-boggling number, but then we live in a mind-boggling country set on a mind-boggling world. You can’t run a country like ours on the cheap, and the country’s “like” a business, maybe, but not “a” business. (At least until the SC holds that corporations can field armored units.)
In line with your efforts here, I’d like to make a request — Can you give us something on the practicality of 10-year budgetary projections? Do those really make sense outside of the same kinds of computer models bankers used to convince themselves that bundling risky financial commodities would be just a fine thing to do more and more of? Are there solid reasons to support the idea that we can make anything but the most suspect claims about the economy 10 years out, rather than some more conservative 5-year model (for instance)?