We all know our national debt is in the trillions and growing by trillions every year. But does anyone really know how much a trillion dollars is?
A trillion is one followed by twelve zeroes. That's still not real meaningful. Another way of putting it is that a trillion is a million millions. That's better but still hard to comprehend.
Okay.
A penny is ¾ of an inch in diameter.
A grid of 100 pennies ($1 dollar) is 7.5 by 7.5 inches.
A grid of 10,000 pennies ($100) is 6.25 by 6.25 feet
A grid of 1,000,000 pennies ($10,000) is 62.5 by 62.5 feet, a little bigger than a baseball diamond.
A grid of a trillion pennies ($10,000,000) is 11.84 miles on a side.
The national debt is in excess of $25 trillion dollars.
A grid of 25 trillion pennies is 69.19 miles on a side. And that’s just pennies.
We multiply that by 100 to get dollars and our grid expands to a whopping 691.86 miles on a side, that’s about from Madison, Wisconsin, to Oxford, Mississippi. In other words, 25 trillion dollars in pennies would cover most of the continental United States.
Or you’d have to drive in your Lamborghini (you’re share of the national debt) at 60 miles per hour for 9.86 hours to navigate just one side.
We have to end this madness. This debt will have to be paid back at some point. We will either become slaves to this debt, or we will collapse as a nation.
Before it's too late, we need to call a Convention of States to discuss spending and jurisdiction restraints on the federal government.
Sign the petition at conventionofstates.com.
Tom Ward is a Conover volunteer in technology, content writing, grassroots recruiting, and legislative action.
