So What the Heck IS a TRILLION ??

Simple:  It’s a gazillion bazillions…….  ;-))   >>>>>>>>>>>>

 Various media have been tossing around the “Trillion” numbers lately.  As we mere mortals do not have the capacity to just envision off hand the actual worth of a “trillion”, the numbers become happenstance and meaningless. 

I mean, we get – and easily – the value, or worth, or size of a million pebbles, or a million mattresses, or feathers, or rubies, and of course a million dollars.  We can grasp the concept of a “Million”.

Billions get trickier.  Two million, okay.  Ten million, okay.  100 million a little vaguer.  1,000 million – which is one billion – is fairly hard to put your finger on.  (Yes, it would be very nice to get your hands on a billion, and I encourage it!  Still, it might take a week, or month, or year or so to figure out what to do with all of that.) 

A billion is a very large number for us to wrap ourselves around.  And it was some decades back that politicians, and the media, began to inure us, to accustom us to the sound of a Billion as an okay number to toss around for government spending.

Now in 2019, Billion is out and Trillion is in!  This is NOT a good thing, NOT a good direction, and definitely NOT sustainable (to use one of their words).

This PageTutor.com link will give you an excellent and simple progression of pictures to let you see the difference between a hundred dollar bill and a trillion dollars and it takes well less than one minute to look at.  And keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt.

• Now that you’ve seen the link, [You did click on it, didn’t you?] let’s talk trillions…… remembering that it takes 1,000 Billions to make up that Trillion. Our current National Debt is 22 Trillion.  That’s 22,000 Billions (and that’s not counting the extended promises in our socialized programs).
• Beto O’Rourke wants to spend 5 Trillion on Climate Change myths.
• Our current U.S. budget is 4.747 Trillion:
  

  Federal Spending Breakdown

  “4.747 Trillion. Almost two-thirds of federal spending goes toward paying the benefits required by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The interest payments on the national debt consume 10% of the budget. The remaining 30% of spending goes toward discretionary spending… The largest is the military.”  [The military budget is currently $716,000,000,000 or .716 of a Trillion.]
  

• Speaking of Medicare, several Democrats and a few Republicans want socialized medicine or “Medicare for All”.  “One Size” medical care never works but putting that aside the 10-year price tag being bandied about for this mediocre medical malpractice is 32 Trillion. 
• And the current GrandDaddy of them all is the Green New Deal which the Congressional Budget Office (another worthless government bureau we would never miss) estimates the cost to be at 93 Trillion.

And be very wary, very cautious of the decimals used in “Trillion” numbers.  Decimals tend to look small to us.  They are, after all, fractions and fractions are only segments or portions of something.  They are less than the whole, less than one. 

So let’s take 2/10 of one trillion: 1,000,000,000,000  x  .2  =  200 BILLION dollars.  That’s a breathtakingly very big bunch of money.  It is over 25% of the current military budget.  Yet you can see how it could just slip by almost unnoticed.

PS:  “In Fiscal Year 2018, the government’s total net loss was $1.16 TRILLION. Uncle Sam collected $3.4 trillion in tax revenue in FY18. But they spent over $4.5 trillion.