A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
-attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen
Maybe it is time to update this old saying: “A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
Sometimes I wonder whether the American public just get de-sensitized to all this talk of millions, billions, and trillions of dollars that the government spends (and wastes) every year. It is scary because only a people who feel that the government can and should do a lot would be willing to put up with a government that spends such mind-bogglingly large amounts of money. We Americans need to wake up and get a good grasp of what our federal government is doing, which is mostly spend our money on themselves, their pet projects, and unachievable utopias. We cannot hold our public officials morally accountable for the money they waste if we don’t know exactly how much they waste.
Well, there is a great link circulating around the internet that visually demonstrates just how much a trillion dollars is. It is links like these that reawaken the moral imagination. Hope it has the same shocking impact on you that it did on me: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
Filed under: Money, Moral Imagination | Tagged: impact, one trillion dollars, visual demonstration, what does one trillion dollars look like, what is
