How much is a Trillion Dollars anyway?

Well... according to Geneviève Guitel, a french Mathematician, one trillion dollars would depend on which country you live in - so there are different definitions!

The reason I bring this up is because the United States is currently in more than $14.5 trillion dollars of debt outstanding. The following link can show you the current numbers in a 'live' and interestingly presented way http://www.usdebtclock.org/. This is a scary figure to pay off......I thought my student loans were bad!. The US government currently makes $2.2 trillion in yearly income and spends just over $3.8 trillion, so just how much is that? The easy answer is, 1 trillion dollars = one thousand billion dollars, and looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000 (12 zeros or 10¹²) OR $14,641,629,631,349 when referring to current US National Debt (that's a lot of decimal places!). However, this is the American or "short" scale that is commonly used today in the United States and most other countries. In the past countries like the United Kingdom used the 'long scale' where 1 trillion = one million billion dollars (if that amount of money even existed in 1974 when the switch to the short system occurred in the UK).

So, now that we know how much a trillion dollars really is - most would agree...or continue to agree its quite a lot! This is why I question the US governments ability to repay their loans and I am not surprised when S&P lowered the US Bond rating. The US Govt. issued bonds fell from from AAA (the best) to AA+ (one level lower) in August of 2011. I am slightly torn on how anybody can ever know for sure how accurate S&P figures are??? Remember, this is the rating agency that  rated the 'junk' mortgage back securities with a triple A rating in 2008 - essentially causing the global financial crisis, sparked by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

Referring to the graph it is clear the US is having difficulties finding money to meet their high expenses (medicare, military spending, social programs, etc). No voting citizen wants taxes to increase (which would increase government revenue), so it is an unlikely solution with federal elections just around the corner (November 6th 2012) that taxes will be increased. But as seen in the red line on the graph, spending is increasing, and revenue is decreasing or staying constant. The US needs a trillion dollar idea otherwise I'm moving to Asia.