I want my $10,000

From the AP: WASHINGTON -

Three trillion dollars is about what the U.S. federal government will spend this year for domestic and defence programs and benefit entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, according to President George W. Bush's latest federal budget proposal Monday.

Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That's a million times one million, or a thousand times one billion.

There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if the U.S. government's budget was divided up. If the money was split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.

Counting to three trillion at a rate of one number a second would take almost 95,000 years.

Looking at it another way, one would have to circumvent the globe 120 million times to travel 3 trillion miles - or 4.8 trillion kilometres. Similarly, that would be some 17,000 round trips to the sun. The universe, 15 billion years old at the outside, would need another 200 such lifetimes to reach three trillion years.

The article goes on to say that a person given $1 million a year to spend would need three million years to blow $3 trillion. Or by my calculations if you had 3 trillion dollars and you were to spend one million a day it would take you 8219 years to go through your fortune. Meanwhile the United States, led by our Republican president (not one of them whack job "tax and spend" Democrats - he says ironically), can blow it all in one year and still not provide healthcare for all its citizens.

And since this is "Super Tuesday" and you may be voting, Paul had this little graphic on his website the other day that compares statistics on the US from when Bill Clinton left office and where we stand now. Not pretty.