How much is $14.7 trillion?

Listen to Dave Ross Commentary: How much is $14.7 trillion?

At last check, the total amount of money owed by the federal government was over $14.7 trillion. Do you know how much that is?

As a stack of $1000 bill that would reach 925 miles. Or if you spent a dollar a second, $14.7 trillion would last 460,000 years.

You notice something about these images? Yes, the media always picks the scariest examples, and it only depresses people. We need to use different examples, or else we’re all going to need therapy.

So how about if instead of $1000 bills we had a stack of trillion dollar bills. That would be a stack of only 14 and seven-tenths bills one-sixteenth of an inch high. And the scariest part of that would be ripping a portion off of that last bill.

I saw a scary example that if every dollar was a grain of sand and you put that sand into 12 oz soda can, you’d have 2,467,000 six packs of sand and some very thirsty people.

But instead if you let each dollar represent one atom, you would need five and a third million national debts just to equal the number of atoms in a single grain of sand. I like that a lot better.

Here’s my favorite one. If you printed $14.7 trillion as an uncut sheet of one dollar bills, it would completely cover an area roughly equal to 25 percent of the state of Texas and get fed chairman Ben Bernanke arrested for treason.

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