Truman's Conscience

Now we're talking real money

Well, it’s not every day you get to see these numbers in an official capacity. The U.S. Congress has just raised the debt ceiling by $781 billion dollars making the ceiling $8.97 trillion dollars. As Daily Kos points out every Democrat voted against it with three GOP members joining in (Burns R-MT, Ensign R-NV & Coburn R-OK). What interested me was the example I found from a Daily Kos commenter (Pennsylvanian) illustrating just how much a trillion is:

1 million seconds = 12 days
1 billion seconds = 32 years
1 trillion seconds = 31,710 years

How's that for perspective. I can’t imagine a clearer analogy demonstrating just how large this number is now that we are starting to throw it around with so much ease. Now our government debt ceiling is $8.97 trillion? How in the world did we get here? What’s that old saying, “a million here and a million there and we start talking about real money?” Bushworld sure is depressing. There isn't a Democrat on the planet that could spend money like that.