A Trillion Dollars

Not long ago Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was chided for claiming that some 500 million Americans became unemployed in only one month. She said it twice. Since there are only a bit over 300 million Americans, she was ridiculed for being out of touch and perhaps an idiot. I forgive her, however, because I understand that national leaders have lost touch with the word “thousand.” That’s chump change. They can only reach as far down as “million,” when faced with debt loads measured in billions and now trillions.

Almost fifty years ago when I was in the Navy and rode around the world on its newest biggest most powerful most nuclear-powered fastest ship (it still is the fastest aircraft carrier, by the way!), I was fascinated to watch as the last load of materiel was brought to the ship, right before we took off for the Mediterranean. Several 18-wheel tractor-trailers drove onto the pier, accompanied by gun-toting guards, and unloaded their cargo which was driven onto the aircraft elevators and brought in to the hangar deck. Forklift trucks shuttled the palettes over to an opening in the deck that measured probably 12 feet square (3.7m). A work crew had spent hours removing hundreds of bolts to free up and lift off the lid to the ship’s treasury in preparation for loading its storeroom with who knows how many hundreds of millions of paper dollars. I knew instinctively that even though we were always paid in cash, that was way more money than the Navy paid we thousands of sailors and Marines even if we were gone for more than six months. I found out later that the US made its foreign aid payments in cash, and transported the money in its capital ships, the big, defensible ones.
The drawing shows a palette of $100 bills, totalling one hundred million dollars. So what does a trillion dollars look like? Go here to see. Scroll down to the picture at the bottom and remember, the palettes are stacked twice as deep as the one shown above. The little red dot at bottom left is a six-foot-tall person!

Before you enviros get your panties in a bunch, no trees were slaughtered to make this heap of bucks. American money is printed on paper made from cotton and linen. Aussies and Kiwis use polyester. But in today’s “economy” dollars are actually made from bits and bytes transmitted over the Internet, making them the “greenest” of “greenbacks.”