No matter how you look at it, $1.9 trillion of anything is a big, big number
By APThursday, February 4, 2010
How big is $1.9 trillion? Very
WASHINGTON — A 1.9 trillion-mile trip is about the same as 8 million trips to the moon.
Unfortunately, the $1.9 trillion in new borrowing authority Congress is giving President Barack Obama won’t take people quite that far. The additional $1.9 trillion raises the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion, but that limit may have to be increased again after the November election.
No matter how you look at it, 1.9 trillion is a lot. In dollars, it equals about $6,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. It’s almost twice all the money America has spent on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
That amount would buy about 422 Nimitz Class aircraft carriers, which run about $4.5 billion apiece. It would be enough to provide Pell grants of $5,000 to some 380 million low-income students, a number exceeding the entire population of the country.
And 1.9 trillion feet would take you to the top of Mount Everest 65 million times, or to the bottom of the 36,000-foot Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the Pacific, about 53 million times.
In terms of time, 1.9 trillion seconds adds up to about 60,000 years. And 1.9 trillion hours ago, or almost 220 million years ago, dinosaurs were just beginning to dominate the Earth.
