What Could You Buy With a Trillion Dollars?

Now this is one eye opening article about the National Debt to say the least. The ones that immediately jumped off the page were these:

40,816,326 New Cars

The 2010 Volkswagen Jetta TDI wins Kiplinger's Best in Class honors for cars in the $20,000-to-$25,000 price range. At a sticker price of $24,500 each, $1 trillion would let you drive away with a fleet of Jettas equivalent to 30% of all the cars already on U.S. highways. (The total U.S. car fleet is more than 135 million, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, excluding trucks and SUVs.)

Imagine a fleet of 40.8 million cars driving down the road paid for with Red Chinese money? That is pretty much what Obama spent in just 9 months. That is just breathtaking.

140 Billion Hours of Labor

That's calculated at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Still hard to get your mind around? How about this: One trillion dollars is enough to hire all 2.8 million residents of the state of Kansas -- men, women and children -- in full-time, minimum-wage jobs for the next 23 years.

Too bad with all that spending we still can't beat that 9% unemployment rate. I wonder if you just took that trillion and permanently slashed payroll taxes by 1/2 and see how many jobs that would be created that way?

1.33 Trillion Chocolate Bars

Got a hankering for something sweet? A sweet $1 trillion will buy you that many 1.55-ounce Hershey's Milk Chocolate bars at 75 cents apiece. That's 64 million tons of chocolate, equivalent to the weight of more than 150,000 Boeing 747-400s.

If you take the figure 3 billion pounds of chocolate is consumed per year that means that works out to 42.6 years of chocolate consumption. Now that is a lot of chocolate.

Replace Annual Incomes for 19.2 Million American Families

Median household income in the U.S. (half the families earn more, half earn less) was $52,029 in 2008, according to the Bureau of the Census. At that level, $1 trillion would be enough to cover the incomes of a sizable percentage of total U.S. family households. There are no recent official estimates, but the 2000 U.S. Census figured there were about 71.8 million family households.

In other words it could pay the entire salary of 26% of all working families in America. If you dropped the figure to like $40,000 you could pay for millions more.

The worst part of all this spending is that most of that money seems to flushed down the toilet. We see no decent return for that amount. No growth or a reduction in unemployment. Instead we just borrow more from the Red Chinese and set that money on fire. I wish we could take away that credit card for a few months and learn some actual fiscal discipline for once.