One trillion dollars

We're about to spend one trillion dollars we don't have. Awesome.

I'm entertained by people illuminating the size of the number using analogies. Here are some of my own for your own enjoyment. To start out, the population of the United States is considered to be roughly 306,000,000.

Population of the US: 306,000,000.

That's a lot of people. But check out how many zeros are in one trillion.

One trillion dollars: $1,000,000,000,000.

If you were to divide one trillion evenly and cut a check to each man, woman, child, infant, and who-knows-what living being in the United States, everyone would get over three thousand dollars.

Trillion divided by population: $3,268.00

Let's not get carried away, though. Let's be fair and only give taxpayers this money we don't have.

Taxpayers in the United States: 138,000,000.
Trillion divided by taxpayers: $7,246.00

That's a lot of dollars per taxpayer, especially considering that most taxpayers probably don't even pay seven thousand in federal taxes each year.

There are a lot of seconds in a year, right? 3,600 per hour; 86,400 per day.

Seconds per year: 31,536,000.

How long would it take me to spend a trillion dollars if I spent one dollar per second? Do you spend $86,400 per day? I don't.

Trillion dollars spent at $1 per second: 31,710 years.

What if you bought a $200 8 GB black iPhone every second? Surely Apple would have trouble manufacturing an iPhone every second, right? Well, they better warm up the assembly line because it's going to be busy for a long time.

Trillion dollars spent at a rate of an 8 GB iPhone per second: 159 years.

The 8 GB iPhone may be obsolete in 159 years. But you would have five billion iPhones, which is pretty awesome.

The gross domestic product of the entire world is roughly 54.5 trillion dollars. Only 13 countries in the world have a GDP higher than a trillion dollars.

People like to verbally beat up evil corporations, especially those villains among villains, the oil companies. With a trillion dollars, you could wholly own the top three oil companies and have 135 billion and change remaining. That's enough for a few cars to use your personal oil supply.

ExxonMobile: $452,505,000,000. (Market capitalization)
Shell: $220,110,000,000.
British Petroleum: $191,844,000,000.
Total: $864,459,000,000.
Remaining for fleet of cars: $135,541,000,000.

Maybe you'd rather own the automobile manufacturers. How would you like to add the following companies to your portfolio? Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen (Audi, Porsche), Daimler (Mercedes Benz), Honda, and Nissan. Ever heard of these guys?

Toyota: $172,166,000,000.
GM: $13,180,000,000.
Ford: $14,410,000,000.
Volkswagen: $101,057,000,000.
Daimler: $86,992,000,000.
Honda: $52,445,000,000.
Nissan: $37,425,000,000.
Total: $477,675,000,000.

Oh, that only totals $477 billion. I guess we should throw in some more small companies for good measure. How about Wal-Mart and Microsoft? Just a couple no-name start-ups. Take a gamble. Maybe they'll hit it big one day.

Wal-Mart: $210,973,000,000.
Microsoft: $264,132,000,000.
Total (including above auto manufacturers): $952,780,000,000.

You'd still have 47 billion dollars in change. You could have a moderately comfortable lifestyle on 47 billion dollars, not counting profits from your portfolio of holdings.

One trillion dollars is a lot of money to spend when you don't have it.