In the Senate, John Thune (R, SD) has just offered a cornucopia of explanatory devices to help Americans grasp the concept of “trillion.” His examples:
* If you had $1 trillion in stacked $100 bills it would be 689 miles tall;
* If you carefully laid those dollar bills end-to-end the line would stretch around the world 39 times;
* If you were a contemporary of Jesus’ and happened to have $1 trillion in cash and liked to spend exactly a million dollars a day, you’d still have some portion of your original stash left over today;
* When the young John Thune was a business school student he had a calculator so primitive that it didn’t have a trillions digit on it. He hopes that the calculator industry has been taking notes and is expanding display screens to keep up with these new, expansive fiscal times.
Working off Mr. Thune’s primary research, we can offer this proprietary breakdown regarding the portion of the bill going to infrastructure spending (broadly defined):
That stack of hundreds? About a hundred miles tall. The carefully-arranged end-to-end strip of hundreds? About six-plus times around the world. The free-spending friend of Jesus? Broke. And John Thune’s old calculator probably could have handled it. But just barely.
