How Much Is A Trillion?

A trillion used to be a number that never naturally came up in normal conversation. Now all of a sudden, it's the standard unit we seem to be using to talk about our economic problems and what we're trying to do about them. We are dangerously desensitized to this king of truly mammoth words... and thus, we throw the word around as freely as pennies to a wishing well.

Fortunately, I think I finally got a handle on what $1 trillion really means.

A trillion dollars is about the total amount collected in income taxes by the U.S. federal government in fiscal year 2006-- $1.04 trillion, if you're curious to know the exact number. That gives me a simple rule of thumb for personalizing these numbers. If I want to know what an additional trillion dollars in government borrowing or spending will mean for me, I just imagine what it would be like to pay twice as much in federal income taxes for one year.

So, for example, with the President's proposed budget calling for deficits of $1.75 trillion for 2009 and an additional $1.17 trillion for 2010, after 3 years of paying twice as much as I paid in 2006, I'd have about paid off my share of the bill for the first two years of the proposal.

Couldn't the government get its hands on that $3 trillion from, say, somebody else? Uncle Sam actually did collect an additional $838 billion from social insurance and retirement receipts in 2006, but pretending that yet another midnight raid on Social Security is somehow going to fill the gap is pure fantasy. Then there's that $354 billion in corporate income tax receipts; no doubt there's going to be an effort to grab more out of that cookie jar, although I'm afraid that such efforts will prove to be hugely costly economically and not produce nearly as much revenue as some might think.

Maybe the Federal Reserve could help out. The total currency in circulation at the moment is about $900 billion. If the Fed were to create as much money in the next year as it did during the preceding 95 years combined, and then use it to buy up some of the outstanding Treasury debt, it would doubtless produce an inflation rate in excess of 100%, but at least it would get us most of the way through another of those trillion.

I said most of the way... we're not there yet and I am out of analogies.