I cannot fathom a trillion dollars! It is way beyond my capability to understand just what can be done with a trillion dollars. I know one thing; a trillion dollars is just a bit more than I have in MY piggy bank!

 What is a trillion dollars?

A trillion dollars is written as $1,000,000,000,000.00; with 12 zeros before the decimal point! That's one thousand billion dollars! That's one million million dollars! That's one billion thousand dollars!

Get that?

 What can be done with a trillion dollars? 

Well, I'm not going to make a list of all the great things that we all know a trillion dollars could be well spent; the list would fill more pages than I could write!

Suffice it to say that a trillion dollars could educate, feed, heal, house, and otherwise care for much of the world for quite some time. A trillion dollars could pay for three or four Katrina style disasters; heaven forbid!

 What are other examples of a trillion?

Let's think about something other than dollars for a moment; to get a feel for just how big a trillion really is.

• You could circle the globe forty million times to reach a trillion miles.
• You could travel to the sun and back over five thousand times to reach a trillion miles.
• You could travel round trip from New York to Los Angeles over 160 million times to reach a trillion miles.
• We could travel to the moon and back over two million times to reach a trillion miles.
• We could populate (to today’s Earth population) more than 160 Earth-sized planets with a trillion people.
• We could populate more than 3000 United States countries with a trillion people.
  Get it yet?

 Now about the trillion dollars; just for the trivia in it:

• We could purchase over three million 2009 Rolls Royce Phantoms or Bentley Azures or Maybachs with a trillion dollars.
• We could purchase over 20 million 2009 Chevy Corvettes with a trillion dollars.
• We could wrap the earth about 4700 times with a trillion one-dollar bills laid end to end around the globe.
• We could stack a trillion dollars worth of pennies to reach over half-way to the sun.

Get it now?

So, what's the point?

A trillion dollars represents just a few hundred billion more than what has been earmarked for the Wall Street and other bailouts by the United States Government.  A trillion dollars is just about double that which has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan so far. 

 Just between the Bailouts and the Wars, America is somewhere around $1.3 Trillion dollars out of synch.   The U.S. Government does not have a trillion dollars on hand; a fact that promises to become the next several generations' dark clouds of perpetual and burdensome taxation.

 A trillion dollars could have been used for real emergencies like world hunger and world peace, instead of throwing life-preservers to those entities and industries who have somehow mismanaged, mishandled, misaligned, miscalculated, mistaken, or miscreantly squandered away the future of the American people.

 Is this more doom and gloom?  No; doom and gloom are the bywords of those who feed us the sad stories about the global economic woes and worries.  I do not believe for one moment that nobody saw any of our current situation coming.  I am not sure why something was not done before things got to where they are, but that, as they say, will probably remain a mystery.

 Somehow, somewhere, someone has been sleeping at a lot of “proverbial wheels” I think. It is unimaginable how a presumably strong and thriving economy can suddenly dig itself into a crater of nearly a trillion dollars deep! But, hang in there; it will all come out in the wash!

I know you get it now!