1.35 Trillion Miles

A Trillion Dollars Taxes the Mind and the Taxpayer

A trip around the world at the equator is about 25,000 miles. So 1.35 trillion miles would be a dizzying 54 million circuits around the globe.

More from this Slideshow

0 of 0

Counting to 1 Tr... Thinking of counting to a trillion one second per number? Better get started. It will take 31,688 years.
Adding More Year... And tack on a few more years if you want to go for 1.35 trillion, the dollar estimate for the federal deficit in the current budget year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Paying Off the F... The whole sum could be taken care of if every American, all 300 million of them, forked over $4,500.
$12 Trillion Dee... Back in 1981, President Ronald Reagan, characterizing the national debt as it approached $1 trillion, commented that "a trillion dollars would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high." The debt, the accumulation of annual deficits, now stands at more than $12 trillion. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
40,000 Top Playe... Put another way, the $1.35 trillion could pay for 40,000 players like Alex Rodriguez, whose $33 million salary in 2009 made him baseball's richest man. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
216 Firms' Payro... Or think the $6.25 billion paid out by Goldman Sachs in salaries and bonuses in 2009 was a lot of money? The federal deficit could support the payroll of 216 such financial firms.
1.35 Trillion Mi... A trip around the world at the equator is about 25,000 miles. So 1.35 trillion miles would be a dizzying 54 million circuits around the globe.
Zeros A trillion is one followed by 12 zeros.
1 Trillion High The Washington Monument, overlooking the deficit debate in the Capitol, stands about 555 feet tall. Stacked end to end, it would take more than 2.4 billion monuments to reach 1.35 trillion feet. That's well more than double the distance from the Earth to the sun. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
1 Trillion in We... Being sat on by a 10,000-pound bull elephant would not be pleasant. What about if 135 million pachyderms were piled up? (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)
1 Trillion Years The Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. A long time until you consider that 1.35 trillion years equals 300 Earth lives. Looking at more modern history, 1.35 trillion seconds would take us back more than 40,000 years, when Neanderthals were using stones to make tools. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)