Nobody can picture a trillion. That is not a failure of intelligence, it is a limit of the equipment. Human beings evolved to count things in a field, and the field was never this big.
Which is a problem, because every number in this subject is a trillion of something and none of them mean anything to a reader who cannot feel the difference between one and forty.
So here is the difference, in three ways.
Seconds
Start with time, because a second is a second and nobody can argue about how long one is.
Count out a million seconds and you have counted 11 and a half days.
Count out a billion and you have counted 31 years and 8 months.
Those two words sound like neighbours. One of them is a fortnight and the other is a career.
Now a trillion seconds. 31,688 years. Not a career. Longer than agriculture. Longer than writing. A trillion seconds ago there were people painting on cave walls in France and the ice had not finished retreating.
The national debt is 40 of those. Counting one dollar a second, without sleeping, you would need 1.27 million years, which is longer than our species has existed.
Paper
Now stack it.
A US banknote is 0.0043 inches thick. In hundred dollar bills:
A million dollars is 3.6 feet. It fits in a gym bag, and one person could carry it.
A billion dollars is 3,583 feet, two thirds of a mile straight up. That is taller than any building ever constructed.
A trillion dollars is 679 miles.
The debt is 27,146 miles of hundred dollar bills.
The Earth is 24,901 miles around at the equator. So the debt, in hundreds, laid flat end on end, goes around the planet and keeps going for another 2,245 miles.
Where that $40 trillion came from, and why the number itself is the least useful thing about it, is The Debt Doesn't Pop, It Leaks.
Hours
The third way is measured in the one thing you personally spend.
At the average American production wage, working full time and spending nothing:
A million dollars takes 15 years.
A billion takes 15,340 years.
A trillion takes 15.3 million years.
Measuring money in time rather than dollars is the whole method of A House Used to Cost 6,900 Hours, which does the same trick with houses, wages and the price of beef.
If you had started working full time on the day the pyramids were begun, and saved every cent, and never bought anything, you would be about three hundredths of one percent of the way to a trillion dollars.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks
When a politician proposes something that costs 50 billion and a critic calls it reckless, and somebody else points out that the deficit is 2 trillion, most listeners file both under "big number, government, whatever." But the second is 40 times the first. Two things that feel adjacent in a sentence are not adjacent at all.
The same failure runs the other way. A billion dollars of waste is real money and worth being angry about. It is also 0.05 percent of a 2 trillion dollar deficit. Both of those statements are true and the argument usually gets to keep only one of them.
You cannot reason about a budget in units you cannot feel. Most public argument about this subject is people passing around numbers none of them can picture, which is why it so often ends with everybody agreeing that it is a lot.
The Only Honest Way to Hold It
Do not try to picture a trillion. It cannot be done.
Use ratios instead.
A billion is a thousand millions. A trillion is a thousand billions. The debt is forty of those. Interest on it is one, every year, before anything else in the budget gets paid.
Or better, use time, which is the unit you actually live in. Interest alone runs about $2.9 billion a day. At the average wage, one day of interest is 44,000 years of somebody's full time work.
That is the number I would keep. Not the size of the debt, which is unfeelable. The size of a single day of interest on it, measured in a life.
A million seconds is 11.6 days; a billion is 31.7 years; a trillion is 31,688 years. Banknote thickness 0.0043 inches per the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Wage figures from the Federal Reserve Economic Database, series AHETPI, at 2,080 hours a year.
This is general economic writing and not financial advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and none of it accounts for your circumstances.
