The recent talk of another relief package to the tune of $1.9 trillion has monumental consequences. Granted, some economic relief is needed for all the parties affected, by no action of their own, in this time of a severe pandemic. Also, a trillion dollars is an unimaginable amount of money. Politicians throw the word around like it’s nothing unique. It is!
The national debt is approaching the same value as the national GDP, or gross domestic product, $30 trillion. That has unknown consequences when the two shall meet. To illustrate the amount of money a trillion dollars actually is, I offer this visual example. If you stack a million single $1 bills on top of each other, it will roughly equal 358 feet tall. If you stack a billion $1 bills on top of each other, it will be about 67.9 miles high. Now if you assemble a trillion $1 bills in a stack, it will be roughly 67,866 miles high! Yes, miles. That’s one-quarter the distance to the moon! Google this to fact-check my rough numbers.
Politicians need to get a very, very sharp pencil out when dealing with money they’ll need to print or borrow. They need to be very precise in their needs. It has extreme consequences down the road when prescribing excessive deficit spending and heed caution for frivolous tertiary frills and expenses for pork funds. My guess is that the $1.9 trillion number can be trimmed down to be a bit more realistic dollar amount so our great, great grandchildren aren’t paying down all this accumulated debt. Could the financial cure be worse for our nation in the long term more than the pandemic?
— T. David Boyd
Wasilla
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