How much money is $14.3 trillion?

Dave Ross Commentary – Listen: How much money is $14.3 trillion?

All of this talk about the national debt ceiling has us drowning in examples of how much money $14.3 trillion is.

For example, as a stack of thousand dollar bills, it would reach 900 miles.

Or, if you spent a dollar a second, $14.3 trillion would last 448,000 years.

You notice something?

Yes! The media always picks the scariest examples. And it depresses people.

We need to use different examples, otherwise, we’re all going to need therapy.

So how about if instead of thousand dollar bills, we had a stack of TRILLION dollar bills; then $14.3 trillion would be a stack of only 14 and one third bills, one sixteenth of an inch high. The scariest part would be ripping a 2-inch piece off that last bill.

I saw a scary example that if every dollar was a grain of sand, and you put that sand into 12 ounce soda cans, you’d have 2.4 million six packs of sand, and some very thirsty people.

But if instead you let each dollar represent one ATOM, you would need 5 and a half MILLION national debts to equal the number of atoms in a single grain of sand. I like that a lot better.

And my favorite one: if you had $14.3 trillion as an uncut sheet of one dollar bills, it would completely cover an area roughly equal to the states of Iowa and New Hampshire in a blanket of currency.

And hey — presidential candidates do that every four years, and we’ve survived just fine.

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