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Good To Know: 'Trillion' In Perspective

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Aug 25, 2009 10:55 pm US/Central

Good To Know: 'Trillion' In Perspective

Reporting
Don Shelby
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ― Tuesday, the White House released figures saying the U.S. deficit will reach nearly two trillion dollars. We throw the trillion number around a lot these days. Don has a feeling we really don't know what we're saying.

Maybe we are lulled by the fact that the word trillion is just a little bigger than the words million and billion.

Here are some examples I found today looking at economic Web sites: Let's use inches instead of dollars. A thousand inches is 28 yards. A million inches is 16 miles. A billion inches is 16 thousand miles and a trillion inches is 16 million miles.

Let's use seconds. A thousand seconds is close to 17 minutes. A trillion seconds is nearly 32 thousand years.

Now dollars: If you earned $50,000 a year, it would take you 20 years to earn a million. It would take you 20 million years to earn a trillion dollars.

If you laid a trillion dollars end to end, the chain would stretch from the earth to the moon and back again, 20 times.

I'm going to be careful from now on when I say a trillion of anything.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

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