Fox News ran a story today, although the issue hasn't gotten much of a media spotlight. It should! The Congressional Budget Office report on fiscal 2009 shows some serious deficit spending went down. When you compare how much Uncle Sam spent in the last 12 months with how much revenue he received, there is a $1.4 trillion shortfall. We have all gotten used to saying "trillion," perhaps we need a refresher on what this represents.
Let's make a stack of one dollar bills. To give our stack some stability, we will lay 4 bills end to end. We will add 5 more similar rows adjacent to our first row. So now we have completed our first layer that is 4 by 6 bills in size, roughly 2' by 15". Next we will add 41,667 more such layers (and subtract 8 bills from the last layer) to make it an even $1,000,000. This stack will be a few inches shy of 14 feet tall. (A dollar bill is 0.010922 cm thick.) Okay, that's our first stack.
Now let's repeat the same process and create an additional one million four hundred thousand more "one million dollar stacks." If we butt each new stack up against the previous one in a long line, we would create a side of 1,183 stacks. We would then form a second side of 1,183 stacks perpendicular to the first. Now we just fill in the interior defined by our two adjacent sides with 1,397,124 more "one million dollar stacks," and, voila, we have a handy (maybe not so handy) visual representation of what $1.4 trillion dollars looks like.
Our resultant rectangular solid will be 2,366 feet long (almost one half mile), almost 1,479 feet wide (a little over one quarter mile), and slightly under fourteen feet tall. This is the equivalent of an 80 acre parcel of land covered to a depth of fourteen feet with tightly stacked dollar bills. That is over seven parcels just like the one pictured above, cleared of all trees and stacked tightly to a depth of 14 feet with dollar bills. 80 acres of cash with 41,667 layers of dollars bills covering the entirety represents how much more the government spent in the last year than it received in revenue. How encouraging!
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